The pic to the left is of master SA blogger, Bradley Whittington, from the online gallery of his favorite pics.

You’ll see that I mixed them up a bit to do this collage, and could do so because Brad uses the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.0‘ license for his site.

Brad told me that he uses the cc license because he’s a big open source advocate and Creative Commons fits really well into the open soure paradigm. Also, ‘because there is no real reason for me to have to control my content - beyond proper attribution, that is.’

A lot of the famous bloggers out there (Dan Gillmore, Joi Ito, Larry Lessig) use Creative Commons licenses because claiming default copyright rights to work that is moulded by a community of users doesn’t really make sense. By using Creative Commons licenses, bloggers can make a statement about wanting their ideas to be copied and spread, thus improving their reputation, or their ‘brand’ - the most important asset that you have as a blogger. Using the license is also a signal that you’ve joined a community of people who have the same ideas about how creativity and innovation can be spurred on, enhancing your access to creative raw materials that can be remolded for different audiences around the globe.

So SA bloggers, get cc happy and put a link to your chosen license on your weblog - it may not seem like a lot, but by doing it, you’ll be making a bold statement about the relationship that you want to have with your community. The stamp is like a welcome mat that says, ‘Please, come in and play’ rather than, ‘Look, but don’t touch.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2004 at 5:20 am and is filed under Featured Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.