rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Geez, how did I not blog this yet! We released the CC Metrics Project this week to open up the data so that anyone can help figure out how many CC licensed pieces of media are out in the world. CC has put a new number at 130 million, but I personally, as in a personal capacity, think this number is very very low! If Flickr has 70 Million CC licensed photos, then combine the rest of the cc licensed objects in the web, is the lower bound really only 130 million items?

Please help CC figure out a more accurate number please! There are tools, scrubbed apache logs, and more to help sort things out. If you don’t have time to help with this project, then please write a story about this project, shoot me an email for an interview, or help by blogging more about this project.

CC BizDev Intern Tim “thwang” Hwang, Mr FabBitches himself, aka Lucas Barton (The Power Glove, its so badddd), wrote on the CC blog about this:

Tim Hwang, Business Development Intern here. Along with Jon Phillips and many others, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and excited to announce today that we’ve officially launched the Creative Commons Metrics Project!

Recently, there’s been a growing academic interest in understanding how CC adoption is changing the creative landscape worldwide. Metrics is a wiki-project designed to bring together existing efforts and encourage collaboration on this emerging field of research.

You can read more details about the project on our Press Releases page, and can visit the project directly to browse what we’ve gathered so far (and contribute!).

(image: Giorgos Cheliotis’ chart of global CC adoption and permissiveness — learn more about his amazing work at the Participatory Media Lab)

Here is the blog post draft I never released from the CC blog since I went on vacation to Yosemite with my parents on a fake vacation last 6 days:

We are on a roll with releases! Last week we successfully launched the Case Studies project which “explores and adds noteworthy global Creative Commons stories” (translation: an open wiki-based way for anyone to add and edit case studies about Creative Commons integration). This week, we are releasing the Metrics project.

Often, businesses, press, and people ask us CC folk, “How many CC licensed objects are there out there there?” Our response in the past varied in some accounts and then the solution struck us: release privacy scrubbed apache logs free of copyright, any tools we have used to scrape the web or find linkbacks from Google and Yahoo, and encourage people who are smarter than us (researchers and scholars around the world), to do research on this data to help everyone accurately understand how Creative Commons licensing is spreading globally.

Work on this project has been inspired by the great work by Giorgos Cheliotos and the Participatory Media Lab in Singapore.

A chart showing latest CC license usage we can stand by comfortably

So, if you look at the project website, you see information useful for getting, processing and visualizing CC license usage globally.

Ok, so I trailed off on finishing that post. If this interests you please do join CC communication channels and help CC make better estimates and research about usage that will help all.

Mike blogged about the ccHost 4.5 release for all you to update your sites to for stability right before the massively updated 5.0 arrives on the scene. If you have forgotten, ccHost is the engine behind Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library (which both need developers). More info below:

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Also, Asheesh packaged up liblicense 0.7 which is useful for all wanting to add licensing to your application. I want to get liblicense into a couple of applications like Eye of Gnome and something else fun. Any ideas open source developers? There are resources to help work on this at Creative Commons if you are interested in something fun:

I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…

LL_LICENSE and other constants were “extern const char” arrays before. Now they’re just lousy old #defines. This way, even though the strings might appear more than once in memory, it’s very simple for the IO modules like exempi.so to refer to those constants.

Before, due to dynamic linker loading order issues, if liblicense.so were added to a process’s memory memory map at runtime, if liblicense then tried to dlopen() its modules, the modules wouldn’t be able to find those constants. What a drag! That broke the Python bindings’ ability to use the modules.

Now, I guess that’s still true, but the modules don’t need actual symbols from liblicense anymore.

I noticed this issue in the process of creating and testing RPMs for Fedora. I had to bump the SONAME because this removes symbols from the library.

You can grab it on SourceForge, and perhaps soon in Fedora Rawhide.

That’s right! We have ~ 2 days left on our fundraiser to bring in USD$ 20,000.00 by April 18. We have ~240 pledges from community members totally USD$ ~10K right now and need to bring it home with 10K more by the end of the day! If you have a large contributions and/or are a business with a large contribution and would like to match this, contact me asap! We have received much press and attention from this grass roots campaign, and your support of this would help put us over the edge!

Who wants to be a big hero like the ~240 people who have contributed? This is an amazing fundraiser and its great to see the big numbers of people who have supported this campaign! Check out the stats in that we have over 720,000 views of this campaign! That is astounding!

Elsewhere on the web, others have made great posts about this like Andy’s post on LGM2008, excerpted below:

LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly at worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!

you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential

Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.

You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.

• will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
• will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
• will pango get used by fontforge ?
• will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
• One thing is certain;

All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!

Help us achieve our goal and bring together software developers to solve problems for all users of your favorite creative applications!

As a side note, I will be attending this LGM in Poland and will be in Berlin and Poland having some meetings and giving some presentations prior…if you are in the area, contact me and/or stay tuned for more.