Hblog

Film premieres

I've seen some incredible movies this week at sxsw - a number of them world premieres. I only hope that they're successful enough to get to your town - otherwise get them on DVD!

'Bush's Brain', directed by Michael Paradies Shoob and Joseph Mealey, is a documentary that follows the career of Karl Rove, the "brains" behind George W. Bush, his advisor and electoral strategist. Rove is a frightening character - he reminds me a lot of Iago in Othello, except that he does a lot more of the dirty work himself.

'Blackballed: the Bobby Dukes Story' won the 'audience award' at the sxsw. Directed by Brant Serson, 'Blackballed' was one of the funniest films I've seen - a lot of the hilarity came from the fact that most of the action wasn't scripted and the actors actually developed their own characters and bios. The story follows Bobby Dukes, the former Hudson Valley Paintball Champ, who returned to his home town after a ban of 1- years to reclaim his title.

If watching 'Super Size Me' doesn't get you onto a healthy track, nothing will. This is an excellent documentary tracking the changes to a normal person's body when they eat Macdonalds for 30 days straight. Actor, producer and director, Morgan Spurlock, is funny and brave in this critical look at why Americans are so fat, and how responsible the food industry is for this epidemic. The movie website notes that it's coming out in May - I'd love to see how Macdonalds deal with this blow.

Another world premiere, 'This Land is Your Land', directed by Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright is another must-see. Moving on from Naomi Klein's 'No Logo', the documentary looks at 'the impact of corporations on American society, culture, and democracy, told mainly from the point of view of ordinary citizens.'

'Slasher' is a modern-day version of 'Death of a Salesman'. Directed by John Landis, 'This slice-of-Americana documentary follows the man considered by many to be the world's greastest living used car salesman; chronicling his life in the business as he travels from town to town, creating "slasher" sales to unload vehicles other car sales staff are unable to sell.' We were left feeling pretty sad after watching this - the man is obviously an alcoholic with a co-dependent wife - it seems as though it's only a matter of time before disaster will strike the family. Great movie - wonderful soundtrack - definitely worth seeing.

Well, that was fun - I got to be a film reviewer for a week :)

group hug

Gabriel Jeffrey, of grouphug.us, is probably one of the funniest characters I've heard here at sxsw. His dry, ironic sense of humor had the audience giggling the entire hour - although it did seem that an hour was more than enough time to talk about the site that won the sxsw web award in the 'weird/extreme' category. Grouphug allows anonymous posting of peoples' confessions - the site was an instant, 'accidental' success that has drawn thousands of postings from 30/40 000 unique users of the site.

Asked about the most popular confessions, Gabriel said: 'I masturbate too much' was the most common.

moblogging for the masses

When Molly Kennedy started talking to her journalism and design students at an Italian University about publishing on the Internet, they weren't all that interested. “The Internet isn't for Italians,” they said, “It's an English thing.” This was before they tried out “moblogging”, or mobile blogging – a process of regularly updating a personal or community website with photographs from your mobile phone.

Mie Kennedy was really surprised at the popularity of her moblog when she started posting. Kokochi.com is an intimate personal moblog where Kennedy talks about daily events, travel, the people she meets and her observances from life in San Francisco. According to Kennedy, the interesting thing about moblogging is that “this gets interesting when it gets mundane” so that the reader becomes facinated by the intimacy of a person's posts. Mie's picture of her in the new hat that she bought in Austin and the cute baby she saw at sxsw keep readers coming back again and again.

The moderator, Adam Greenfield, made the comment that he was surprised at how little people tried to distinguish their sites by a clear sense of place. Rather, the most successful sites are where people talk about day-to-day with scenes of urban life that could be shot from anywhere – anywhere in the North at least.

An interesting application that I hadn't heard about is something called WinkSite http://winksite.com/site/index.cfm which enables users to sidestep the Internet by publishing from phone to phone. I've just set up an account here and am really excited about playing around with this new tool – it looks as though there would be some really great applications for South Africa where mobile use extends to poorer populations – and, what's more, you get to choose a cc license when you design your site.

HipTop Nation is another cool community moblog site with its own basic rules –

Cool bananas!

sxsw celebrates creativity

The Creative Commons team is making great progress here at sxsw– meeting with the people who actually use or may use the licenses is a great experience – it's a reminder of the relevance of our work to the massive creative force in society that is represented here and makes the relatively isolated work to come all the more worthwhile. I have had temporary pangs of guilt over the past few days that I'm having way too much fun to call this work, but I quickly remind myself how important it is for us to make good connections with the people who will drive innovation in the realm of copyright in society.

Creative Commons was involved in two panels at sxsw this week – Neeru Paharia, assistant executive director, in 'Legal Music Promotion: File-Sharing, Sampling or Both?', and executive director, Glenn Otis Brown, on a panel asking the question, 'Can Copyright Bring Audience and Filmmaker Together?'

The music panel discussed creative alternatives to straight copyright on the Internet. Sal Randolph talked about Opsound (Open Sound Resource), 'a record label using an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory
for new ways of releasing music.' Opsound licenses music under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, and its open sound pool lists a number of tracks, many of which have been designated as 'Remix Ready', which means that the artist has offered to provide uncompressed source material for remixing (by email or on the web). I love this track from the opradio resource.

Although a little aggressive about marketing the mp3 format, Matthew King Kaufman has produced a great resource at mp34u.com for musicians to showcase their work and for listeners to download legal songs.

Jake Shapiro, from Public Radio Exchange, talked about a fascinating project to distribute quality radio programs online. According to the site:

The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is a nonprofit Internet-based service for digital distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio content. The mission of PRX is to build a fair market for creative radio work and a station-producer community of increasing gains; to create more opportunities for diverse programming of exceptional quality, interest, and importance to reach more listeners.

PRX brings new voices to the airwaves, creates a new revenue stream for producers, and helps noncommercial radio stations assemble diverse and exceptional programming.
More.

Neeru's description of Creative Commons' upcoming music license and related 'Mixter' site made me really excited about the potential for collaboration amongst artists. Mixter will feature tracks that can be remixed to create new versions that contain clear links back to the original. Still in development, Mixter will provide an excellent resource for musicians to work together and learn from one another, but who may be limited by time or geographical factors. I think that it may be a good idea to indicate geographical influences on the site i.e. a South African kwaito beat mixed into a southern U.S. blues melody.

Although Glenn urged panelists in the film panel to prevent this being 'a love fest for Creative Commons', it kind of turned out that way, with a number of 'converts' in the audience recognising cc licenses as a great way to distribute their work. Zack Exley and David Jacobs from Moveon.org and Media Rights spoke about their decision to use Creative Commons licenses because the main aim of their work is not to sell as many copies or viewings as possible, but rather to get the message out to the widest possible audience. Justin Cohen, winner of the cc 'Moving Image Contest', spoke about his use of public domain footage from the Internet Archive and cc licensed music tracks in the production of his entry. “I wouldn't even have attempted it if it hadn't been for the availability of this content,” he said.

Filmmaker, David Ball, finally talked about the launch of the new Fourth Wall Films website and his licensing of every element of his film, Honey, under cc licenses. Glenn has a great post on this here.

sxsw has been all about soaking up the latest challenges, ideas and trends in the creative sector and applying them to the direction of cc. Every conversation, every experience of music, film and creation charts the path of cc as intimately connected to the needs of a growing number of active creators. I hope that if this century offers one great advance to civilisation, that it is our ability to celebrate and enjoy the artist that is within all of us. sxsw certainly reminds me of this.

Bruce Sterling's annual rant

I thanked my friend Wendy for hauling me out of a talk about the social designs in online gaming to hear the annual sxsw Bruce Sterling “rant”. The author of a number of successful futurist novels, Sterling certainly delivered on the conference organisors' promise of “having a sharp and well-conceived opinion on an almost inexhaustible list of topics”.

His is one of the most forward-looking views on the effects of the Internet that I've heard here. He's also the only person I've heard that has talked so insightfully about international issues – something that future conferences will have to deal with as Internet markets become more dispersed.

Sterling spoke about trends in Internet security, outsourcing, emerging economies and the failures of the Bush administration in the realm of – amongst others – Internet security, predicting that such failures are having an impact on the awakening of dormant economies in the developing world.

Some of his most interesting comments were about the technological and cultural revolution happening in India. He said that the party in power in India has done a great job of putting together the right ingredients for a great blossoming that has seen more advances in health, education, and social upliftment than the country has seen for the past 2000 years. He said that the party currently in power in India was essentially “anti-Ghandi” in nature and in blood, the direct descendants of those who killed the leader in 1984. He attributed the success of the current regime to its acceptance and pursuance of the fruits of globalisation, declaring that people often forget that 'globalisation means everyone's isation – not just american expansionism'.

Another direct, postive effect of globalisation on the Indian economy has come from the diaspora. Websites like suleka.com and bazee.com have enabled Indians living abroad to buy Indian products, send money home and even buy 'the clothes of Bollywood actresses straight off their backs'.

Sterling is also watching Brazil, whose Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, is also a famous musician. Gil (also a great Creative Commons ally) is on a non-stop world tour, logging up countless international travel hours, declaring his wish to 'preside over the “tropicalisation of digitisation”' and making deals for his country's artists with anyone who will listen. A proponent of open source, Gil has recognised that it is only a matter of time before the developing world finds its 'killer app' and that it 'won't be given to them by Microsoft'.

Sterling's comments about spam were probably the most impassioned. He spoke about the extreme filth that is being 'spewed' from the Internet and the massive incompetence of the current administration to listen to the advice even of its own officials tasked with solving Internet security problems. He said the worst thing about Internet security is that the US is pushing its 'great Internet invention' onto other countries, declaring that this is the greatest technological advancement of all time, and that when 'small, shy countries' become connected, they become polluted by the mountain of filth that attacks them from depraved spammers in the US. 'We in the States', he said, 'Are used to this filth, but people from other countries must be shocked at the depravity that comes streaming out of the US Internet into their homes.'

Sterling ended on a note about Austin, about how the city was on a push to become 'the clean energy capital of the world' and how excited he was at this prospect. He said that he was taking his own initiative in this regard, talking about plans to supply energy to his neighborhood from the solar panels on the top of his house.

Austin, he said, is a city that historically tries to do the right thing. It is a place where people seem to have a wonderful ideas about how things should be.

After three days here, I am beginning to agree.