Modiba Productions Presents Nation Beat Animation Contest

Cameron Parkins, May 13th, 2008

Nation Beat, a musical group that “bridges folkloric Brazilian rhythms with classic American roots music”, is set to release their sophomore album, Legends of the Preacher, on July 15th 2008. In conjunction with their release, Nation Beat and record label Modiba Productions are sponsoring an animation contest based on the band and their songs, with the animation assets released under a CC BY-NC license. From Nation Beat/Modiba Productions:

Entrants are asked to submit 60-90 second animated music video shorts featuring a track of their choice. Modiba will offer files from the album’s original artwork featuring the band members as cartoon characters. The files will be offered in both InDesign and Flash formats, and will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, so that they can be used in animated videos by contestants. In addition to the $500 cash prize, the winning video will be featured on NationalGeographic.com, Nation Beat and Modiba’s websites, Myspace pages, and a variety of other media outlets.

To submit an entry, participants must upload their finalized videos to YouTube and send a link to info AT modiba DOT net. By CC licensing the animation assets, Nation Beat and Modiba Productions are able to facilitate an interactive and user-friendly means for fans to engage with Legends of the Preacher, all while retaining their commercial rights. This allows Nation Beat the ability to license their music outside of the competition and provides a means for enhanced fan interaction, two vital, yet often difficult to reconcile, methods of music promotion.

search.creativecommons.org screencast and i18n

Mike Linksvayer, May 12th, 2008

We’ve rolled out a few small changes to search.creativecommons.org:

• The part of the interface we control is now translatable, and has five languages enabled now — Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, and Japanese. You can suggest translations here.
• A screencast on using ccSearch with Firefox, including how to change your default search engine, and change it back.
• Run a default search when the user switches search tabs with no query entered.

You can browse and checkout the code (GPL licensed) from our source repository.

Further improvements we’re thinking about (patches welcome; see source info above):

• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on language. This requires us to learn of more CC-enabled search sites that allow filtering on license terms by changing the query URL. Look at (and add to) our wiki page on ccSearch integration for details.
• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on user preference.
• Provide some contextual help when user switches tabs without entering a query rather than running a default search.
• A complete re-thinking of the interface, including the possibility of a unified metasearch instead of search engine tabs.

Remember, the code is available and GPL’d, so you can run your own version (modulo our trademark policy) in addition to helping us improve ours.

Tune Rooms

Cameron Parkins, May 12th, 2008

Tune Rooms is “a music company that was created for Musicians and Music Fans alike” that aims to “enable music collaboration, promotion, and distribution on your terms.” This is accomplished through the use of ‘tune rooms’ in which users can upload different ideas, song sketches, and the like to the Tune Rooms webspace and allow others contribute to the song by adding new tracks. These ‘tune rooms’ are created in conjunction with musician profiles, blogs, and a variety of other Web 2.0 goodness.

Tune Rooms allows users to CC license their works, featuring the license prominently on each composition. To easily facilitate collaboration, users can choose from BY, BY-NC, and BY-SA licences, all of which allow the original work to be modified. CC licences make this type of collaboration possible by providing a legal framework for Tune Rooms to operate under - users’ works become fluid and malleable by using CC licences, something that is key to Tune Rooms’ focus on online collaboration.

If the promise of an exciting new platform for online music collaboration wasn’t enough to get you interested in Tune Rooms, they’re are also throwing a contest over the coming month with a grand prize of $1,000 in Musician’s Friend gift certificates. In order to be eligible, you must have a submission that includes three other Tune Rooms musicians and have your entry in by June 9th, with the winner decided on June 16th.

ccLearn Workshop Video Now Live at OSL

Jane Park, May 12th, 2008

In April I blogged about Open Source Lab’s fourth official workshop featuring ccLearn’s Executive Director, Ahrash Bissell. The Open Source Lab has now posted a video of the workshop at their blog. The workshop focuses on recent developments within open education, including but not limited to the impact of open licensing, as Ahrash emphasizes the grander scale of the movement.

The video, like all content on OSL’s blog, is licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

ccHost 4.5 and 5.0beta

Mike Linksvayer, May 10th, 2008

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.