connecting*the*dots

Larry Lessig of Creative Commons is quite possibly the last person I would’ve expected to have a civil, working relationship with the late head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti.

I was ready to tar and feather Valenti after watching Kirby Dick’s brilliant documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

Live and learn, I suppose.

Lisa and I hunted around Greensboro yesterday afternoon for locations and people, as we’re looking to illustrate a number of sections of the eventual The People, Yes interface. I’m not sure how successful we were, but Lisa will be heading out again on her own soon.

Would you like to help?

We’re looking for landscape images (they’ll be used mostly in the header, so think wide and short) of a number of subjects:

• Memorable locations - it could be an abandoned lot or City Center Park, just try to include people, in some fashion, within an interesting composition
• Everyday folk at work - from the local barber to an insurance agent, capture them doing their thing
• Homeless people - stay away from stereotypical images (i.e. beer bottles, strewn clothes, etc.), go for portraits and contextual settings

So if you want to help us out, simply tag your Greensboro-based images on flickr with “thepeopleyes.”

I’ll subscribe to the feed and contact you if we’d like to use your shot (we’re a non-profit, so you’ll have to apply a CC license that allows reuse with attribution). I’ll probably setup a flickr group as well in the near future.

Thanks.

With all of the unconferences popping up on the geek landscape, one has to assume that conference formats outside the technology community will slowly but steadily begin to loosen up a bit.

Thankfully, my favorite conference (TED) is making a move in that direction with TEDTalks.

TED is now releasing their talks, one per-week, under a Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to digest the talks and republish them for non-commercial purposes. I’ve just subscribed to their RSS feed (you can choose between the post, video, audio and email newsletter).

You still have to be invited to attend TED, the price tag remains +$4,000 and the format of the conference itself hasn’t changed, but it’s a great move for them to remove the walls and let us common folk listen in on the happenings.

Thank you.

I never watch SNL anymore, but man, am I glad caught it this past week. Sure, I would’ve stumbled across this gem on-line, but catching it on SNL brought me back to the glory days of Eddie Murphy’s White Man.

Angela and I lost our shit over this one. Thank you, Lonely Island guys, and thank you SNL for keeping your ear to the street and plucking talent from our culture of share and share alike.

UPDATE: (2/20/06) NBC forced youtube.com to pull all NBC videos from their site. Sorry.