what it feels like for a boi

1. 
   
   
   Cost
   Google CalDAV is free, and what could be better than free? Simple: something thatmakes you money, which is exactly what the Spanning Sync does with our Save 5+Make 5 program.
   Several people have already made over $1,000 just by including their personal referral code in blog posts, Twitter tweets, and comments. Brian Dusablon is one of those people, and here's what he had to say:

   It's pretty easy to get four referrals, and if you get five or more, you're at a profit already. [Within eight weeks] I hit $1,000. I'm donating half to charity, and I'm buying a Drobo.

   We think saving money is great, but making money is even better.
   
   
2. 
   
   
   iPhone Support
   Calendars synchronized using CalDAV become read-only on iPhone. One of our customers recently rolled out 700 iPhones and 200 iPod touches. This lack of iPhone compatibility makes Google's CalDAV solution a non-starter for them, and for anyone else looking for bidirectional sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.
   Calendars synchronized with Spanning Sync are editable on Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone calendar, and changes made in any of those places will show up on all three (after syncing your iPhone using iTunes).
3. 
   
   
   Customer Support
   Sync is inherently complex, but when problems do crop up they can usually be solved quickly with just a little customer support. Unfortunately, Google doesn't provide any. They've even said publicly that it's "not feasible" for them to respond to individual requests for support.
   At Spanning Sync, we provide support our customers have called "tremendous", "excellent", and "stellar", regardless of whose software is causing the problem:Google's, Apple's, or ours.
4. 
   
   
   Contact Sync
   Spanning Sync syncs not only calendars but also contacts, including contact photos. Click here to see a video. And of course contact sync works great with iPhone, just like our calendar sync.

If you have ever feared a man in a moustache you were probably justified in doing so if this great little thriller film is anything to go by!

Fresh from the infamous Prom Queen Halloween party to raise money for breast cancer, my newly clean shaven face begins the task of growing back the facial hair. But not just for mere pleasure or because of laziness when it comes to shaving. No, I will be growing a mo for this year's Movember charity campaign.

For those of you who don't know, Movember is an international fundraising event which sees men from around the world sporting fetching moustaches to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer and depression. Here in Australia, monies raised goes to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - The National Depression Initiative.

This year I am taking part of Movember, but as the firm believer in participatory decision making, I couldn't make the decision on which mo to make a part of my attire so I thought I would leave it up to you. Cast your vote to determine what the hair on my upper lip will look like. Voting closes next Monday.



























Not sure which one to go with? Check out my full Movember Poll Photo Set. Still got nothing? Design your own, take a picture and either post it as a comment or email it to me!

During the fundraising month I will be posting a semi-regular photo blog so you can all keep up to date with my progress. And please, consider giving a donation! There are two ways to donate:

1. Donate directly to me on the Movember site using your credit card or PayPal account, or
   
2. Write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation', referencing my Registration Number 1655466 and mailing it to Movember Foundation, PO Box 292, Prahran VIC 3181.

Keep up with all the generous, sexy, amazing people who have donated at my MoSpace . And remember, any donation over $2 is tax deductable.

Image this: it's 10 in the morning and you have a alcoholic ginger beer in one hand, a program that is so jam-packed it reads like a phonebook and a head so full of ideas and information you couldn't possibly remember it all. Welcome to that wondrous, debauturous multi-festival event This Is Not Art!

Consisting of four arts festivals/events, it's arguably australia's biggest and best independent arts festival. If you're into experimental electronic arts Electrofringe is for you. Musos please head to Sound Summit. And get your text on with the National Young Writers' Festival or Critical Animals postgraduate conference. But don't take my word for it, they say "It's the five days of the year where you get to share your ideas, passions and saliva with like-minded crew from all over australia."

So I'm heading down on one of the two flights from Brisbane to Newcastle tomorrow, accompanied by the lovely Amy Barker, Project Manager of Remix My Lit, to talk some talk with some of australia's leading independent artists, performers, musicians, thinkers and ratbags. Here's where I'll be:

Friday 3 October 2008

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING (part of Electrofringe)

ABC Pool Producer, John Jacobs takes you though a clear and detailed explanation of Creative Commons licensing from a producers point of view.

Speakers: John Jacobs, Producer, ABC Pool, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; and Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia
Cost: Free event

LICENCE TO ILL: LEGALITIES, LICENSING, IMPLICATIONS AND IMPLEMENTATIONS! (part of Sound Summit)

Key representatives from APRA, the PPCA and Creative Commons join artists and industry to discuss the latest on artist copyright, licensing, downloading and legislation. In particular, addressing the impact and implications for local music communities.

Facilitators: Ronan Sharkey, Hack/JTV, Triple J, ABC
Speakers: Brett Cottle, CEO, Australasian Performing Right Association; David Vodicka, Principal, Media Arts Lawyers; Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia; Lynne Small, Manager of Finance, Operations; Administration, Phonographic Performance Company of Australia
Cost: Free

BEYOND READ/WRITE: A LITERATURE REMIX MASTERCLASS (part of the National Young Writers Festival)

Read/Write has always been a dichotomy in literature. The author on one side, reader on the other, both toiling away in solitude. But is there a more collaborative space for literature? Can work be read & write? Creative Commons Australia invites you to cut, paste, shuffle & republish in this remixable literature masterclass.

Speakers: Amy Barker, Project Manager, Remix My Lit; Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia
Cost: Free

Saturday 4 October 2008

YOUR CREATIVITY AND SUCCESS: NEW BUSINESS MODELS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE (part of Sound Summit)

Technology did its part in democratising creativity an eon ago, but where has that led? Experts & artists look at bottom up approaches to making music viable: How is active consumption, participation forcing major industry players out of the picture? Is this DIY or die, version 2.0?

Facilitator: Stuart Buchanen, Mixed Industries
Speakers: Beatrice Jetto, PhD student, Department of Media, Macquarie University; Evan Kaldor, Fbi Radio; Alex Crowfoot, Ollo; and Anna John, Cloth Ear
Cost: Free

If you see me around say hello ^_^

It's a science fiction, double feature this week when worlds collide. No, literally. No colloquial saying, were talking about when when worlds collide. Not some famous 1930s novel (or it's now chic 1951 film adaptation), were talking about the first proof of two terrestrial planets actually colliding! Three US astronomers from Tennessee State University, University of California (Los Angeles) and the California Institute of Technology believe they have observed the aftermath of a collision between two planets which once made up part of the binary star system BD+20°307 about 300 light-years away in the constellation Aries. The astronomers believe the debris in the system, which is currently an orbiting dust cloud with far more particles than in our solar system, is what is left of the planets which are estimated to have been similar in size to Earth and Venus. We're not talking some minor extinction event here, we're talking complete pulvourisation! As Gregory Henry, one of the astronomers, said, "If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the ultimate extinction event."

And while we're on the topics of big bangs in space, it's pretty crazy that we're doing it right here on Earth!! (Ok so it's a little bit old) but does anyone else think it is slightly strange to be recreating the conditions immediately before the big bang?! Because that's what the recently launched Large Hadron Collider does. It creates an environment for protons to smash into each other at a speed you can't even begin to get your head around. But it's not all a giant round of doomsday bumper cars, according to the LHC website, what comes out of it might shed light on:

• Dark energy
  
• Dark matter
  
• Extra dimensions
  
• Higgs
  
• Supersymmetry

Speaking of collision, how's that American financial flap? It seems the whole system is teetering on a knife's edge. But not everyone is doing badly out of it. The 'annotated artist' from New York, Geoffrey Raymond, recently demonstrated that money, art and collaborative public commentary can mix. For awhile now Raymond has been 'exhibiting' his oversized portraits of public figures on the streets of the New York financial district, handing out magic markers to passers by and encouraging them to add their comments. As Rosie Ryan over at  Articulate (ABC blogs) documented, The Annotated Fuld, his new portrait of now bankrupt Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld found a buyer (unlike Lehman Brothers); netting the artists $10,000 (USD).

Imagine this: a world inhabited by nothing but pigs. No, I am not enticing you to a new planet I have created in Spore. Nor am I talking about some distant place in a galaxy far, far away. I am talking about planet Earth. That's right, just after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, lystrosaurs⎯a the pig-like species complete with snout and tusks⎯ruled the Earth. They were one of the few remaining species, and with no predators to worry them, “They fed and spread," as Paul Wignall, professor of palaeo-environment at the University of Leeds said. But what remains a mystery is why they died out if there was little natural foe. I don't think they did at all, they just continued to evolve into Sarah Palin.

As part of the iSummit 2008 Andrew Garton and Pavel Anotov (pictured left) were charged with documenting the proceedings. They embarked on two documenting projects: one was a strategic priority scoping paper for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) titled Growing the Global Information Commons and a micro-documentary by the Association for Progressive Communications (apc.au) titled Nailing the Commons. I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the projects. Below is a transcript of the conversation we had (be aware that this was Day 3 of conference events for me, so I am not terribly eloquent):

APC: What is your understanding of the commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the commons comes in many forms. There are many different ideas of what a commons is. Some people think it's anything that's publicly available with limited or no restriction on it. So, everything from public transport to public libraries, that kind of thing.

There's also the legal concept of the commons which is everything that's... where copyright has expired therefore there's no rights attached to that work any more. There's a number of different ways of identifying the commons.

APC: What does the commons personally mean to you?

Elliott Bledsoe: To me the commons is about being able to reuse content and knowing that you can. It's about certainty. And that, you know, things should be available to use... and increasingly that gets narrowed down. So, my idea of commons is that it's actually much smaller and no where near as robust as it should be, but that we can fix that.

APC: Do you see a dividing line between the information and knowledge commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Not really. One's the natural prior point to the other. Information is the foundation of knowledge. The way that we understand and draw together a number of ideas or pieces of information becomes a foundation of knowledge. How we put that information and how we make sense of that... So, no... I think that one requires the other. That knowledge without information is not particularly useful, but that where knowledge... you know, there's a lot of really good, solid information in it makes it much stronger.

APC: What are the main commons issues?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the problem is everybody wants to stake a claim. The user wants to be able to do what they like with stuff that they see and stuff that's around them. The creators want to take advantage of the commons space for promotion, for potential revenue gain and for sharing, for just making their stuff available.
The lawyers want to carve it up, dissect it and state where it starts and where it finishes and what the boundaries are and how you get in... The democracy organisations and large institutions want to fill this space with certain kinds of information on an idea that's going to help further democracy as a concept.
There's a number of different groups who are all trying to stake a claim in this idea of an information commons.

APC: And out of this which one [issue] would you prioritise?

Elliott Bledsoe: I think access is the biggest thing we should be looking at. And if that means that the lawyers need to be what they can to make more stuff available and the democracy organisations need to be doing what they can to make the space as linguistically accessible and, as technologically accessible as they can to the widest number of people... you know, I think that all these kinds of organisations have a very important role to play in making sure that this space is wider, stronger, more robust and is accessible to the widest number of people possible.

APC: Is it the same set of priority issues in the developing world?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, to be honest I think the developing world isn't quite sure what to make of it. You know, they're already got a barrier. Both, in a lot of cases linguistically, but also technologically and economically and so, as a result there's this very western idea that we need to get the information commons out there for the developing world without giving much of an opportunity for the developing world to stake their claim.

What is and what should the commons look like for developing nations. We very rarely pose that question to developing nations themselves. You know, I do think that it's very important that they have an active and participatory role in the development of the commons, but I'm not quite sure we're there yet.

APC: So you think that if we lift this barrier then its the danger that instead of developing their own commons they will have easy access to ours, to the northern commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Exactly. If we don't diversify the commons and if we don't input multiple ways of understanding and drawing meaning out of work, which is things like language and file formats... trying to make as diverse space as we can we run the problem of cultural imperialism. We just dump all of our ideas into this space and say, there you go we've given it to you, you know, take what you want from it, without any real analysis of what affect that has on culture and learning and understanding for people who are outside of that context.

A word for this week? One springs to mind very quickly: 'Safety'.

I had this exchange with Nathan Yergler on Twitter just now. Thought it was worth sharing:

nyergler McCain: "We're all god's children and we're all Americans." Conversely, those who are not Americans... not god's children.

elliottbledsoe @nyergler or worse, those of us who do not live in america are american whether we like it or not!!

nyergler elliottbledsoe: touche!

elliottbledsoe @nyergler LMAO

It seems like just yesterday I was writing about creative commons and photography. But it wasn't, it was actually the day before yesterday! And now I have another update.

Image identification and visual search software company Idée have added to their Idée Multicolr Search on the exciting Idée Labs, expanding the Flickr Set to include 10 million Creative Commons images from Flickr's 'Interestingness' collection.

I know there has been much discussion about the terms and conditions for Chrome. For the record I was totally aware of them. But I think that some of it was a bit fear-mongering and misrepresentative and some of it was out right wrong. As far as I am concerned a clause like the old clause 11 (extracted below) was nothing out of the ordinary really:

BSD License
Copyright © 2008, The Chromium Authors
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  
• Neither the name of the Google Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
  

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Choosing an Attribution Licence in the 'Photo Usage & Licensing' section of the Picasa Web Albums settings.

(Thanks to Fred Beneson. I found out about this via his post on the CC weblog)

Have Google released the prince charming of web browsers? As I am sure most of you are already aware Chrome, Google's open source web browser was released 2 September (USA date). It is BETA right now but like most Google things when released it is pretty stable. UPDATE: I have heard reports from friends that certain features were buggy today. The big one, downloads were not working at all.

Here's some of my thoughts:

You've gone incognito. Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

I saw this morning the Google Chrome comic this morning and my interest in the Chrome project has peaked. An interesting marketing campaign by Google:

Morning tea called for sugar and there was plenty to masticate.

Heather Ford's introductory keynote was a much needed 'let's step back' and reflect on what it is that the collective 'we' of the commons want to do. To help us think through this she posed two questions:

i think the noncommercial panel could have been rolled into the mars landing panel on collecting societies

• Creative Commons is now in 47 jurisdictions. Since iSummit 2007 there has been more regional collaborations occurring. For example International Workshop on Asia in the Commons in the Information Age - Paul Keller.
  
• Creative Commons is moving towards Semantic Web as part of Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). ccREL will express norms in metadata. CC+ and CC0 will rely on ccREL - Mike Linksvayer
  
• CC0 is currently in second BETA format. There is an internal working draft. There is more clarification of the issues around CC0 waiver issues - Dianne Peters