Dancing About Architecture

Over at FeedBurner we recently announced a service that lets you, the publisher of a feed, associate a Creative Commons license with your feed. Is this a big deal? It’s a HUGE deal! I'd like to take a look at how FeedBurner might propagate, respect, and enforce these licenses both now and in the future. In a subsequent post, I’d like to offer up a "Law of License Propagation" as it applies to syndication feeds.

First off, what's so interesting about Creative Commons? You can go to their excellent site to learn all about it, so I won't repeat everything here. But the "big" idea, at least from our perspective, is that they've formalized the notion of a license around creative works that is human-readable, lawyer-readable, and (most intriguingly) machine-readable. When you choose a license to associate with your creative works, you are specifying what the consumers of that work can "do" with it.

That brings us to what FeedBurner is currently doing with associating CC licenses with feeds. The Attach Creative Commons License service allows the publisher to select a license to "attach" to the items within their feed. We do this by adding an element to the feed that refers to a license URI: a unique identifier that resolves to a license (which is a collection of actions and characteristics). In RSS 1.0 feeds, we use the mod_cc namespace, while in RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds, we use the creativeCommons namespace.

Next, FeedBurner pledges to propagate this license information. What does that mean? That means that no matter what kinds of translations and services we apply to the feed, the license travels with it (this includes converting between feed formats and using the appropriate namespace). Where this becomes interesting is when we talk about feed splicing, or the combining of multiple feeds into a single resultant feed. We’ll make sure that the appropriate license is associated with the appropriate item, even if, for example, a license was specified on the feed (instead of an individual item).

So, what does it mean to "respect" a CC license? Well, FeedBurner may offer a number of different transformation services, including attaching some potentially revenue-generating content to feed items (see the Amazon Services Integration posting for an example of this). If we offer generalized feed splicing, for example, and the publisher is not the creator of one of those "input" feeds, FeedBurner is in a position to check to ensure that the license associated with a particular item permits commercial use. If commercial use is prohibited, then we can respect that license and not attach an ad or revenue-generating link to that item.

Finally, what about "enforce" – what does it mean to enforce a CC license. I think the best example of this might be the "Share Alike" characteristic that can be associated with a license. The definition of the "Share Alike" characteristic is: the licensor permits others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the one that governs the licensor's work. If FeedBurner creates a service that transforms or creates some derivative work from a feed item that is governed by this kind of license, we would enforce the Share Alike characteristic and ensure that the resultant item has an identical license.

I hope I've given a sense for how important and innovative this notion of associating, propagating, respecting, and enforcing Creative Commons licenses within feeds will be in the future. We're laying the groundwork for a number of exciting services – both from FeedBurner and from any number of feed conumsers!

Posted by Eric at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey, look! All of your favorite John Grisham characters are here for your courtroom drama: the big evil corporation, the idealistic young lawyer/citizen, and the Belief in the System. The plot is interesting enough to keep you engaged, but to tell you the truth, it really doesn't hang together all that well. I suspect that the many plot cul-de-sacs, useless characters, and convoluted situations are more an artifact of the movie than the book: Grisham may not be a stellar author, but he usually knows how to string his chapters together into a cohesive story. John Cusack gave the one good performance. Gene Hackman was okay, reprising his Lex Luthor role, while Dustin Hoffman was wasted. And what the heck was Jeremy Piven doing in this movie? Give the guy some lines to say! He deserves better.

Runaway Jury (**1/2)

Posted by Eric at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I want it I want it! VOOM is an HD DVR "system": that is, you have a central server and any number of thin clients throughout your house. I'm pretty sure this setup is the future for home media. I'd love to see this commercially available.

So, VOOM is from Ucentric (pronouced "you-centric"), which has been dark a long time. I wonder how many times they've changed direction over the past few years. Well, whatever, I like what they're showing now!

Source: VOOM Demo Video | PVRblog

Posted by Eric at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh man, this is the best bookmarklet/browser hack I've seen in a long time. So you're looking at a book on Amazon.com and you want to see if your local library (remember libraries? free books, music, and movies!) has it ... just click the bookmark and it opens up a window with your local library's catalog. It works! Here's the bookmarklet for my local library (I just dragged the link up to my bookmarks): Arlington Heights Memorial Library.

Well done, Jon ... fantastic.

Source: Jon Udell: LibraryLookup (Build your own bookmarklet)

Posted by Eric at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)
by Neal Stephenson

"The Confusion" is the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle trilogy. I found this to be a much more straightforward tale than Quicksilver, but I’m not sure if that was really the case or if I just got over the initial learning curve with the first book. I think there are fewer characters to keep track of, and the intrigues aren’t quite so twisted. And, as a bonus, it took me less than three months to finish it!

Anyway, this is volume is really the entwining of two books ("Juncto" and "Bonanza") with tenuous ongoing links: it’s like each the two storylines emit and absorb photons from the other throughout the 17-year span this episode covers.

I found the Jack Shaftoe storyline to be the most entertaining: a swashbuckling tale that spans the globe. He truly is the King of the Vagabonds. He acquires quite an interesting band of cohorts (the Cabal), and their adventures are varied and bizarre.

There isn’t as much Natural Philosophy in this book as there was in Quicksilver, but we do get to take a look at the birth of modern financial institutions.

On the whole, I enjoyed this tale, and I’ve got the final volume ("The System of the World") already on order to ship later this month. I might not jump right into it, though … maybe give it a little time.

Original Entry from June 27, 2004:

Kicking off summer by starting the next book in The Baroque Cycle: "The Confusion". I had a mixed experience with "Quicksilver", but I think I'm a better man for having read it. Let's see how this one goes. Still too bulky to take on the train with me, though, so this will be my poolside, take-on-vacation, read-before-bed summer book. Here we go!

Posted by Eric at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This was a fun movie ... almost as fun as Ocean's 11. It's a different kind of vibe: it's both lighter and a little more sinister, if that makes any sense. I loved the Seth Green character ("The Real Napster"), but really all of the actors did a great job. Mos Def is really stepping up, and Jason Statham plays his usual "wheelman" role with typical aplomb. Charlize was very easy on the eyes, and my wife assures me that she had no complaints watching Mark Wahlberg for an hour and a half. Ed Norton's performance seemed a little dialed in, which is too bad, but not enough to really detract from the film. Very entertaining.

The Italian Job (***)

Posted by Eric at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As far as RSS readers go, I'd have to say that Bloglines is number one out there. Personally, I use both Bloglines and FeedDemon. FeedDemon is more polished, but I really like the "access from anywhere" nature of a server-side application like Bloglines: no matter where I reading my feeds, Bloglines always remembers my subscriptions and what I've seen.

But what might the future hold for Bloglines? Well, if the past is any indication, Mark Fletcher, the talented developer behind Bloglines, might be aiming for an acquisition ... and let's face it: as syndication takes off, the big players are going to want to add this capability to their list of services. And time is of the essence -- Bloglines is the big fish in the server-side pond right now, but word on the street is that Rojo (why-o-why does that have to rhyme with "mojo"?!?) could put some serious pressure on that dominance.

Okay, so who would acquire Bloglines? You might think that Mark would go back to the well and talk to Yahoo! (who acquired eGroups in 2000), but hmm, they just bought Oddpost. So, they've probably got something brewing there in the RSS space.

Google? Nah, not with the team that did Gmail on staff. They could whip up a kick-ass DHTML aggregator all by themselves, and if they're not, shame on them. Of course, they did acquire Neotonic in 2003, some old eGroups buddies, but I just think they'll do something themselves, though.

MSN? AOL? Still too early for them. In fact, I think the whole syndication space will probably have to go through another iteration (pushing the feeds down to the protocol level) before this becomes appropriate for the masses.

So who? I'll tell you who: Ask Jeeves. They're still hanging in there, but jumping into this space could be the shot in the arm the old butler needs. They've got some good technology (they're behind more sites than you might think), some decent revenues, but they need some buzz. Bloglines could be just the thing for them.

Of course, Mark might just want to go it alone, to which I say: good luck, and thanks for the great app!

Posted by Eric at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (4)

Yep, that Charlie Kaufman is a weird, creative dude. This is another fascinating film that I thought was just one tiny notch below Adaptation., but still one of the best movies of 2003. It twists, it turns, it's inventive ... maybe just a touch too predictable. Most of the movie has the aura of one grasping at a dream, but there's a real love story in here as well. Fantastic performance by Jim Carrey.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)