The legality of media sharing has always been a hot topic especially when it comes to books; publishing houses and authors are pretty touchy with rights and licensing agreements. But Unglue.it wants to change this by easing their concerns and bringing free e-books to the masses with a little help from Creative Commons.
Read more on Unglue.it And Creative Commons Want To Give E-Books To The World… For Free…
The Default Icon website will come to the rescue if you are facing a design task and you need a set of icons to go with it in a direct (and cost-effective) way. This site stands as a true repository of icons that you can use at no cost when developing applications of every kind, and for every platform whatsoever – mobile phones, iPads… everything is supported because the resolution of the icons is 1-bit.
The actual icons are downloadable in .eps, .png and .gif format. They come in black and white, and when I checked out the site the database boasted 84 icons already. And an update (increasing the number of featured icons) was imminent, too.
The only requisite for using these icons is that you have to give credit to InteractiveMania whenever you use any of them. That is, they are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license. Also, you must not modify the actual icons when you use them – they have to remain the way they are.
Read more on DefaultIcon.com – Free Icons For Your Projects…
Daily Moot is a brand new site that wants to give emerging journalists a chance to showcase their work. Nine different categories are already featured, and these include “News”, “Sports”, “Entertainment” and “Business”.
The most recent content within these categories is highlighted on the main page, and you can also have a quick look at the content that is more popular. In addition to that, the site has a section devoted to newsflashes that will let you stay updated on different developments right as they come along.
The website itself operates under Creative Commons, meaning that the users can write, share or copy the news that are found there without having to start emailing this or the other person to ensure that will be alright.
The eventual aim of Daily Moot is to stand as a platform where news are not only read by people but also written by them. It likewise intends to act as a spot in which the revenue that is generated via traditional advertising is shared among site users. It is not a bad concept, and although it really has a lot of way to go I think it has started the journey on the right foot.
Read more on DailyMoot.com – For Aspiring Reporters & Journalists…
FairShare is a solution that has just moved out of closed beta and which can now be readily used by the public at large. In general terms, it has the objective of letting anybody keep track of his creative commons and watch how his work spreads across the WWW.
That is accomplished in the following way. First of all, the individual must claim his work – IE, his blog, his articles and any other related piece that could be categorized as text work. Once this has been taken care of, the author has to state how it is that he wants to share his work. There are three main options to choose from, namely “Link back to me”, “Non-commercial usage is OK” and “Share as I do”. Upon doing so, a feed will show him the uses his work is being put to, and any modification or remix that might take place.
As you can see, the system is quite uncomplicated and easy to get to grips to. It is also wholly inexpensive, so that if you want to put it to the task and sleep easy on the fate of your own creations, you can do so right away.
There is something that has not been addressed until now: the licensing of tweets. That is, Twitter has no intellectual property rights over the contents posted by its users, and we all know that.
But what about the ones who create these contents, IE the twitterers? Should republishing a tweet without asking beforehand be freely done? TweetCC is a new solution that aims to make it possible for anybody to offer his tweets under a Creative Commons license. In other words: anyone that wants to reproduce a tweet can rest assured he can do so through this service.
To license your tweets, all you have to do is send a message to TweetCC including the phrase “I license my tweets under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication”. On the other hand, a search tool is included on the site, and it will let you realize whether any individual licenses his tweets or not.
The team hopes that Twitter will eventually include a policy along the lines of their service, and that this will redound to a better tweeting practice for all concerned parties. Until that time comes, there is TweetCC to fill in the gap.
Identi.ca is a new microblogging site which of course begs comparison to the mother of all microblogs, Twitter; however, it’s not merely a Twitter clone.
Rather, it’s open source and runs on a CreativeCommons license, providing users with a transparent service that preserves their autonomy, meaning that if you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your own data and move it to another account or server. Also, friends on other microblogging services will be able to receive your messages. This will probably appeal to those frustrated by Twitter’s shortcomings—e.g. its frequent outages and downtimes. Identi.ca does stick with the classic 140 character limit. All content is supported by CC licenses. Currently, features are limited, but there’s definitely more in the works including, SMS updates, maps, cross posting capability, Facebook integration, hashtags, and media updates. You can sign up for a free account now.
TopTenSources.com is a collaborative news project, and a rather interesting one too: when visiting the site, you face the average gossip page, only quite decluttered (some pop-ups do happen, unfortunately) and with most of the people adequately dressed for the occasion.
Once you start looking deeper, you realize that each of the news pieces are actually a mashup of internet media, like blogs, podcasts, video, and other sources; these mashups are composed by the site’s contributors (registered members, that is), so that the site takes the form of a huge collaborative blog in which unlike traditional collaborative blogs, members do not know each other, and no one overlooks the whole job. On top of the collaborators, there are the editors, who also aggregate news, only they generate RSS channels to which site visitors subscribe to, and which usually deal with more general topics, like arts, politics, travel, technology, etc. Also worthy of note is that the site is licensed under Creative Commons. 
PhotoDropper is a simple tool which allows bloggers to drop Creative Commons licensed photos into their WordPress blog. Normally, bloggers tend to do a quick Google Images search however, there they may unintentionally lift a photo that hasn’t been licensed for the taking.
Using Flickr it’s easier to avoid copyrighted pictures as you can search specifically by license. This still takes some time and patience. PhotoDropper, however automates the process, making it incredibly easy. Once you’ve uploaded the plugin you won’t have to leave WordPress to add photos. Whenever you want to add a photo, simply click inside your post where you want the photo to appear and type in your keyword in the Photo Dropper browse panel. Each photo comes with four links, the first opens up the Flickr source page; the next three are for size (S, M, L). You can add as many photos as you wish.
Read more on PhotoDropper.com – Quickest Way to Add Photos to Blogs…
Connexions is an educational platform for developing, sharing, and publishing instructional material on the web. They’ve developed a modular concept of learning by which content is parceled into modules, or smaller chunks of info which are more easily digested and can be arranged and linked in many different ways.
Educators may browse the site by subjects, keyword, or simply by using the search box. To add or create a model, users first need to register, from there, they can convert Word docs or start from scratch. As all content is submitted and distributed under a Creative Commons attribution license, it can be used freely by teachers and students alike.
If you are in New Zealand and you need to find the closest video store or Chinese Delivery or take out, log onto to Zenbu.com and use its special “Find Nearest” search feature where you can type in the town or zip code that you are in and what place you are looking for and it will spit out the results for you quickly.
Zenbu operates a bit like Wikipedia in the sense that it is open source and anyone can log in and edit pages and contibute information to the search engine. The word Zenbu was chosen as the name of the site because Zenbu is the Japanese word for everything, and everything in New Zealand can be found on the site, and they are hoping that it can soon be used as a noun and a verb in the sense that google was incorporated into the English language. For instance, the other day I was looking for a good Armenian restaurant nearby, so I “zenbu’d” the nearest one.
Read more on Zenbu.com.nz – New Zealand’s Local Search Engine…
In case you or someone you know is suffering from a medical condition, and you want to know more about it, its symptoms and treatments, 6abib.com might be an interesting site for you to keep in mind. 6 Abib is an online publication where you will find tons of articles with updated and trusted, medical and health information.
By visiting 6abib.com you can read the latest medical and health news, check a list of recently posted articles, and access the site’s discussion forums and blogs. Besides, this site has an archive of articles on cosmetic surgery, women health, nutrition and other topics, as well as a dictionary of medical terms, information to understand medical laboratory’s analysis and much more.
Would you like to understand your medical laboratory’s analysis by yourself? Are you looking for the latest news on medicine and health? In that case, 6abib.com might be worth a visit.
Read more on Plinkme.com – Free Exposure, Free Photos for Your Site…
