Recently in Joi's Diary Category

Ulrike Reinhard posted a nice "best of" video of our DIY Video panel. The panel was a lot of fun. The moderator was Howard Rheingold and the panelists were John Seely Brown, Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins and me.

The second day of Le Web 3 is starting today, but I unfortunately have to leave in a few hours to go to San Francisco to attend the Creative Commons board meeting and the 5th anniversary party later this week.

Le Web 3 was the best conference of its kind I attended this year. Great venue, great team and awesome speakers. Loic, Geraldine and team, super job. Thanks! Interestingly, my favorite talks were the two non-web people: Hans Rosling and Philippe Starck. Everyone else was great too. Ev gave an thought provoking talk about the importance of less features. (I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently too…) The “Kevin Rose - DIGG in conversation with Sarah Lacy - Author” was funny too. Anyway, I’m not positive, but I assume they will end up online. Worth taking a look. I talked about the World of Warcraft and Creative Commons. Yes. I managed to make a connection. ;-)

The only bad thing that happened to me was my file system melt-down that caused me to lose a bunch of stuff. The conference team was able to get me a copy of Leopard that I installed which allowed me to restore enough of my functionality to do my presentation.

However, as I was messing around around with it this morning, I managed to erase 5 gigs of original RAW images from trip. :-\ I was able to salvage some and have posted them on a set on Flickr.

Mart explaining architecture

I just returned from a trip to Tallinn where I completed the paperwork to invest in GuardTime, an electronic archive and log authentication system using cryptographic time stamps.

The idea was developed by the founder of the company, Märt Saarepera and his collegues in Estonia when Mart was in Japan. Mart started out as an academic and a researcher, but became an entrepreneur in residence at my company Neoteny back when we were still incubating businesses. At the time, our team thought that the business was too early and passed on the investment and Mart set off on his own with support of his friends and family and some minimal support from myself.

Years later, it looks like the market is finally ready for Mart and his product. His idea has also developed from a rather theoretical idea to something they can show and ship.

Mart has raised money from a group of investors including the Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) founded and run by some of the Skype founding technical members.

Because of securities laws in Estonia, I needed to visit Estonia personally to open an account at a bank there. The banking in Estonia is really advanced, having been built from scratch after the Internet existed already. They use hardware password generators for their online banking and offer more services through the Internet than any other bank I’ve ever seen. Also, because they don’t have a lot of legacy crap like banks in Japan, they are very profitable and lean.

Tallinn was a very cool city. It is the capital of Estonia with a population of about 400,000. In many ways it reminds me of Helsinki except smaller and with Skype as the anchor IT global brand instead of Nokia.

The old town where I stayed was a beautiful district with the old architecture preserved and the random Russian government buildings scattered around typical of this former USSR region. Embedded in this old-architecture are very nice restaurants, shops and hotels built in the cool super-minimalist style of Nordic Europe that I love so much. I stayed at a hotel called Three Sisters and it was the best small hotel I’ve stayed in recently.

Another cool thing about Tallinn was that there was free wifi everywhere. The hotel, railway station, offices and airport all had free wifi. The Internet was faster than in Frankfurt airport, the Frankfurt Sheraton, in fact faster than just about anywhere that I’ve been recently other than my office in Tokyo.

I don’t know if it is the Estonian culture or Mart’s community, but everyone I met at GuardTime and Skype seemed happy and smart. There was a buzz of a strong culture and good work being done. I miss think sort of feeling “pure” feeling these days.

I’ve uploaded my photos in a Flickr set.

Technorati Tags: cryptography, Estonia

Shibuya Center Gai

I spent High School in Japan. I lived in Shibuya and went to The American School in Japan in Chofu.

I grew up in Shibuya. Back then, in the early 80’s, Shibuya was a hot area of Tokyo. Brands like Van Jacket, Domon, Jun, etc. and the “Shibuya Casual” or “shibukazi” scene were getting a lot of attention. Shibuya was full of bars, clubs, restaurants, clothing shops and places to just hang out on the street.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time “on the street” buying liquor from vending machines, chasing rats and going to game centers and clubs. Back then, it didn’t really matter if you were underaged and the discos were packed with Jr. High School aged kids. I went to my first nightclub in 9th grade. You could buy bottles of whiskey, Suntory White, in vending machines.

During summers I hung out in the fashion buildings, sometimes helping in the shops and always going out with the designers, shop staff and hair dressers after work. The Japanese bubble was just getting going and everything felt like an endless drunken party and a explosion of consumer brands and excess.

Later, after I first dropped out of college, I returned to Shibuya to run an after hours club at the end of Center Gai. That’s where I met Hyperdelic Video and a lot of my “crew”, many of whom I still work with. I also met Keith who was running Tower Records at the time. I used to have him let me put my club flyers there. I was probably just a scrappy little kid to him then.

When we first moved to Shibuya, we lived in a fancy house paid for by my mother’s employer, ECD. Later, we had to move to a dumpy little two room apartment made from a converted love hotel. That’s when I hung out the most with Keigo (Cornelius) who was living with his mother in the same apartment building.

Walking around Shibuya at 7AM this morning brought back memories of all-nighters and the craziness of my teenage years in Tokyo. I shot some photos and uploaded the set to Flickr.

Me with Timothy Leary's terminus made of his mortal remains

As Timothy once said, "everyone out there gets the Timothy Leary they deserve". WAV File

Today, I did an interview with agent etoy.Monorom and agent etoy.Silvan for their Mission Eternity project. My job was to channel Timothy Leary who is one of the test pilots of the project. The project involves a terminus made from the mortal remains of Timothy which are connected to a sarcophagus installation. It keeps track of and maintains a network of volunteer angels who keep his archival identity parts alive on the Net. In many ways it is still a work in progress and I was contributing in my own way.

I had told etoy that several of us had had experiences in the past where Tim asked us to channel him. When he was busy or needed to do other things, I would be asked to play his role by answering questions and explaining thoughts. I was working on a book with him at the time and would talk about the ideas from our book, The New Breed. Most silly questions looking for an answer were responded to with a, "think for yourself!" In the past, I did these interviews in chatrooms with Tim often in the next room so it wasn't that hard to imagine what Tim would say. Now 10 years after his death, I had to think a deeply about what Tim would think about the current state of affairs and try to play this role.

It was a lot of fun.

While I was preparing for this, I reflected on Wikipedia where someone edited a comment on my Wikipedia article from "Ito is Timothy Leary's God Son." to "Ito has claimed that he was one of Timothy Leary's so-called 'God Sons'". Someone nice edited it back eventually. Also, somewhere along the line, my name was also scrubbed from Timothy's article as well. I realize that to some people my relationship with Tim is not notable or interesting and possible annoying. I don't really feel like being greedy about it at all. It just feels a bit sad that something I said on my blog has been reduced to a claim that looks like some kind of heavy name dropping...

As I thought about this more, I remembered the quote from Tim. I also remembered that Tim touched people deeply and made them feel special. I think EVERYONE he touched directly or through his work came up with their own Tim. I don't feel I have any right to take away from that. However, I think that it would be great if we can understand Tim as the aggregate of all of our Tim's and somehow come together to help him come back to life through our memories. I really think that this is what etoy is trying to do with Mission Eternity and that makes me happy.

What's amazing to me now is that as more and more information becomes available online and we are able to talk to each other about our memories... Tim can come back to life instead of fading and through us, maybe he becomes much larger than what he could be if he were all in one piece right now. I look forward to working together to bring back his spirit instead of bickering over the pieces and the details of the past.

Update: Chris found a video of Timothy calling me his godson. Thanks Chris!

Tom Coates

Fiona and danah

I’m at one of my favorite meetings of the year - the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium.

It’s being streamed here: http://131.107.151.221/SCS - open in VLC as MMS

We also have an IRC back-channel on irc.freenode.net/#scs2007

Also hanging out on #joiito as usual…

Uploading photos in a Flickr set.

Gerfried Stocker

Other than being 7 degrees celcius and raining most of the time, Ars Electronica this year was a lot of fun. It was packed full of work for me this week with five talks and ten media interviews, but with Sandra, Elizabeth and Fumi's help, everything went smoothly and I survived. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to see all of the installations or talk to as many artists as I would have liked, but I had more than enough interesting conversations to make it great.

I went to Ars Electronica this year together with the MOGA unit which is a collaboration between Professor Inakage's lab, Joi's lab (mostly Fumi) and Hiroyuki Nakano's Peacedelic team. MOGA set up the "Jump" installation in Linz. Yuichiro Katsumoto, also from Professor Inakage's lab presented Amagatana. It was fun seeing the students I had been working with in the Ars Electronica context.

I think that most of the talks will end up online somewhere, but I'm not sure where. ;-) I did see one video interview on Artivi.com.

The theme of this year's Ars Electronica was privacy.

The first session I participated in was with the Austrian Association and Judges and members from the Ars Electronica community. I talked broadly about the generation gap and the how the behavior and use of the technology was very different among the new users of the Internet and how difficult it was, yet how important it was, for the older generation to try to understand the way the new generation used the new medium. I was really impressed in the conversations with some of the judges and how forward looking they were. I also talked about the importance of Global Voices in the future of global democracy. I suppose that federal judges can think more long term about democracy and things like the cost of privacy than their politician brothers. Having smart judges is a great thing as the recent ruling by the 10th Circuit Court in the US shows.

Summer Watson

The second session I participated in was a discussion about future trends with some of corporate executives. It was a good group with a number of interesting presentation. The presentation that was the most interesting to me was Summer Watson, a British soprano opera singer, who announced that she is going to ski the last degree (from 89 to 90) of the North Pole and sing an Aria at the North pole as a call to action on environmental issues.

I had coffee with her afterwards and we talked a lot about Creative Commons and online identities and was inspired to start the Summer Watson Wikipedia article.

I also did a session about WoW which I think you can imagine without me going into too much detail.

Volker Grassmuck

I did a session with Leonard Dobusch to talk about importance of Free Networks and Free Knowledge. Again, I'm sure readers of this blog can imagine what my position was. Leonard, who is also the son of the Mayor of Linz, had some interesting perspectives on the role of municipal governments in supporting public access. He had co-edited a book recently where they discussed many of these issues. He cited an article by Volker Grassmuck where Volker argued that having a public space for hosting content on the web was important.

Finally, I was on a panel as part of a awards ceremony and a kick-off meeting for Fair Music. The idea behind Fair Music was sort of a music parallel for the Fair Trade mark. Whereas the Fair Trade mark tries to identify products where the production meets basic Fair Trade parameters and requirements, Fair Music marks were awarded to companies and projects where the artists and consumers were treated fairly. Fair in this context means a number of things including the artist receiving a fair share of the remuneration or the project promoting diversity against the bias of "Northern" dominance in the music business.

I mostly talked about the need for new business models and the role of Creative Commons in this context.

I uploaded my photos a Flickr set.

Although I still haven't decided which camera to take with me, I'll be leaving for Linz in a few hours to attend the Ars Electronica Festival. According to my bio page on the site, this is the 10th year that I've participated. Most years I've gone twice - once for the jury and once for the festival. I think that makes Linz the city I've visited the most in Europe.

I love Ars Electronica and all of the people involved and I'm excited to going back after missing last year. I'll be giving a few talks and will be on a number of panels. A few of them are linked from the speaker page. Otherwise I will probably be wandering the installations and the talks with my camera.

See you there!

Just got home from Aspen and Taipei. Thanks to everyone for all the fun.

Shona Brown in Aspen

Benajamin Mako Hill at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei

I've uploaded my photos as Flickr sets - Aspen Institute 2007 and Wikimania 2007.

Mizuka and Kaoru 2007

When I was born in Kyoto my father was still at Kyoto University studying under the late Kenichi Fukui. My grandparents on both sides had been against their marriage - my father a merchant class boy from Kansai shunned as lower-class by my mother's noble family from Northern Japan. My father's family wanted him to marry someone who was healthier and more likely to be a hard-working member of their family. Because of this, my parents were rather poor, lacking any support from their families. We lived in a dumpy home and they struggled to make ends meet.

Kenichi Fukui's wife, Tomoe, had a brother who knew people in the Geisha district, Gion. Through this connection my mother was able to get a job teaching English to geisha and maiko in Gion. They called her "Momoko-sensei". She taught at a geisha teahouse called Minoya.

Later, we moved to the US. Kaoru, the teenage daughter of the mistress and owner of Minoya wanted to visit the US. My parents agreed to let Kaoru come and stay with us for six months or so in exchange for baby-sitting. Kaoru was 18 and I was 3.

Me and Kaoru at Yellow Stone National Park

We were so poor that my father once scolded Kaoru for eating too much food. ;-) Kaoru returned to Kyoto and eventually took over the family business of the geisha teahouse which she continues to run today.

I kept in touch with Kaoru over the years and I have made a habit of popping down to Kyoto whenever I can to see her and my other friends there. Kaoru is my guide and interface to Kyoto. She reminds me that when I visit a famous philosopher's house, that I should NOT, even when asked twice, actually accept the invitation for tea. She tells me how to deal with restaurant owners, geisha, maiko and monks... without her, I would never be able to navigate the exceedingly complex social system of Kyoto.

She still treats me like a 3 year old boy sometimes and embarrasses me to no end by continuing to call me by my baby name, "Jon-bon"... which as a result is my name among all of the geisha of Gion. The benefit, however, is that many of the geisha and maiko are like family. Even though I only lived in Kyoto as a baby, Kaoru and my geisha and maiko friends in Kyoto really help me continue to feel like Kyoto is my home. They provide me with an essential culture backbone to my Japanese nationality.

I'm at Frankfurt airport getting stuck in elevators during fire alarms and stuff...

I just posted photos from Barcelona on Flickr.

Jet lag woke me up again at 3AM so I watched the Adobe Lightroom stuff on Lynda. I learned how to control more things in post-processing so I went out into the foggy and hazy sunrise to take some photos in the yard to play with in Lightroom. I still have a lot to learn, but I think I have a better handle on how to deal with overcast lighting... Which is good since it's rainy season in Japan right now and overcast a lot.

I also learned how to fix chromatic aberration which I used today on one of the images.

I thought about whether I should go back to a more journal-like form for my blog or start writing more stuff on Flickr. I seem to be spending more time responding to comments on Flickr these days than on this blog. I suppose my online presence needs an overhaul.

As I prepared to answer a rather long list of questions for a Macedonian newspaper, I realized that I would be motivated to write more thoroughly and spend more time on the answers if I knew I would be publishing them on my blog. I chatted with the journalist and he agreed. Thanks Vlado.

So here are my answers to some questions about the Internet, CC and Mozilla. Not that new for those of you who know this area, but if you're going to ask me some basic questions, you can start here. ;-)

Maybe I should be plopping this stuff onto a wiki...

I blogged a decision to become vegan on December 13, 2006 which is approximately six months ago. I'm happy to say that it was the right decision and that I've never been healthier or happier as long as I can remember and I intend to continue being a vegan.

Other than some allergies, I've gotten rid every one of half-a-dozen or so chronic conditions including obesity, fatty liver, high uric acid (gout), heartburn/ulcers/stomach acid, nervous tension, sleeping problems and rising cholesterol. I also have more energy than I've ever had.

I've lost approximately 18 kg (40 lb) or so and have been stable at this weight for about the last two months. Most of the weight fell off during the first few months and my weight loss has slowed to a basic equilibrium. Other than the slightly scrawny look I have now, I think most people think I look healthier.

The experience is not a scientific experiment. I started exercising almost every day, quit smoking and quit excessive drinking. Each of these things seems to help the other, but I don't think it's just the diet.

When I started this diet, I thought that it would be a sacrifice and that I would be trading good health for less fun. I am happy to say that I enjoy eating as much or more than when I was eating meats and fish. Since going vegan, I've really started getting into my garden and my composting. I spend hours and hours in the garden when I'm home. I dream about my garden and my compost and have really internalized the cycle of waste/compost/plants/food.

Now when I encounter a fresh tomato in a lonely airplane, I get a burst of joy as I imagine where this tomato has been, the soil that it came from and where the soil got the nutrients to allow the tomato to grow. When I eat local vegetables in my travels, I imagine what sort of local farms or hills the veggie came from and enjoy the image of the chain of events before I received it. In addition to the wonderful bursts of taste that I now appreciate much more, I also get the happy feeling of participating in this wonderful natural cycle. Mindfully eating a breakfast plate of grilled veggies and fresh fruits is really a joy.

Clearly, your milage may vary and I don't intend to proselytize or judgmental of those who aren't vegan. However, if you've thought about being a vegan for any reason, I suggest you try it. It isn't as hard as it sounds.

We're still working on getting more contributors for the Vegan Wikia if you're interested.

Technorati Tags: gardening, vegan

I'm reading The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. In it, they suggest that we should focus on pursuing happiness as our goal in life and the we should be careful to make a distinction between happiness and pleasure. Doing crack, drinking alcohol and even enjoying nice weather are mostly pleasures and not real happiness.

One of the core elements of happiness, according to the Dalai Lama, is compassion. Cutler describes how many psychologists will argue that man is inherently greedy and that the first thing that babies try to do is look for a nipple to suck milk - an inherently greedy desire. However, Cutler argues that babies also have a basic instinct to connect with people and illicit a smile or compassion. Babies will stare at you and smile and this makes you feel good and care about the baby. This basic social behavior is an important instinct for babies in addition to the sucking for milk. The argument is that compassion is also a basic human behavior and not something that you have to learn after you are older.

The Dalai Lama describes ways of increasing compassion. One exercise he suggests is to meditate or think deeply about someone or something (like an animal) and think of that person or animal suffering. You could imagine a lamb in fear before it is about to be slaughtered or a friend in some deep pain. As you imagine this, a feeling of compassion emerges. The Dalai Lama explains that one should be able to feel compassionate towards everyone and everything.

In general, I'm a fairly compassionate person, but I do have people and things that annoy me. Recently I've started to practice meditating on those things that annoy me and building compassion and understanding. I still find it difficult at times, but as I do it more and more, I'm finding that I'm becoming happier and happier.

We then realize that we need to develop patience to build compassion. Our patience grows by being challenged by annoying or hurtful people and events. It is these people and events that ultimately are our teachers. We should learn to cherish and be thankful for these annoying things, because without them we would not grow and become even happier. (So thank you all of you annoying people! ha!)

Compassion vs greed is something that we've been talking a lot about in the context of amateur vs professional. I think that compassion and the happiness one gains from giving and sharing is one of the fundamental driving forces of the sharing economy just as greed and the "economic man" are fundamental elements of capitalism and neo-classical economics. I think that in order to really understand how the sharing economy works, we need to understand how happiness works and what makes people choose compassion over greed.

We often make decisions which involved trying to decide which decision will make us happier. We often mistake pleasure for happiness and make the choice that may be more pleasurable instead of the choice that would provide more long-term happiness. The Dalai Lama says that just framing questions to yourself in terms of what will give you more happiness and making a distinction between happiness and pleasure will help us make the right decisions.

It often takes self-control or will to choose happiness over pleasure. As I become more conscious of my happiness, I realize that awareness of this distinction and awareness of your happiness helps to reinforce and provide feedback for your decisions. This feedback makes it easier and easier to make the "right" choice.

Update: Added "patience" in paragraph about teachers.

Just when I thought I had come home, I'm off on a longish trip again.

I'll be going to Switzerland, Germany, Croatia, Macedonia, US and Puerto Rico. Haven't been to Europe in a few month so looking forward to it, but not looking forward to being away from home for so long again.

I just offset 300,000 miles of flying with 60 tons of wind energy carbon credits at NativeEnergy. Should last me for a bit.

See you on the other side.

I'm at All Things Digital again. This year features, among other things, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together in a joint interview. This should be interesting. It seems unclear whether the video will be released so I'll try to be there to blog it.

Anyone else here?

I just arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo. My room's not ready at the hotel and there were various complications, but I'm really happy and calm. I feel almost like I do when I'm meditating. I don't know if it's the drawing, all of the reading/talking about Kriya Yoga and Buddhism or just the great weather, but I can't really imagine anything that would stress me out right now.

/me knocks on wood

On the other hand, I better not jinx myself. I'm SURE there are things that could happen right now that would stress me out. Ha!

Also, apologies to my SF friends, but I'm in town for less than one day this trip and won't have much chill-out time. I have to go back to Tokyo tomorrow morning.

Partly because I've always wanted to try a mini-Triathlon and partly because I'm beginning to get minor wear and tear on my body from exercising every day, I've started cycling, swimming and running. It's easier to follow the 10% rule that way too. (Don't increase your exercise routine more than 10% a week.)

My current exercise media of choice for the 3 are:

Running - Podrunner with Nike+ and iPod Nano (just donated to Podrunner)
Swimming - Ambient music on my SwiMP3 (taking a rest while my shoulder repairs)
Cycling (Stationary) - Lost, 24 and other TV episodes and videos on iPod Video.

UTC

I'm so sick of time zones and daylight savings and my blog posts being all funky because of it. I've tried it before, but haven't been able to do it well. I'm going to try it again. I'm setting the clock on my computer to UTC and would like people to tell use UTC with me when appropriate. For instance, when scheduling telephone calls.

It actually makes it much easier if you convert to UTC for me. There are too many moving parts otherwise. In the southern hemisphere, the daylight savings goes the opposite direction of daylight savings in the north. In addition, different countries switch on different days. Then there are countries like Japan that don't observe daylight savings. So when people try to tell me to do something in some country, it sometimes requires two lookups - any adjustments in my country and any adjustments in the original country. Using UTC reduces the chance of error by forcing people to only track the +/- UTC in their own time zone. At least that's the theory.

Time and Date.com and The World Time Server are good sites for checking what time it is anywhere and Aion is a good OS X menubar thingie to show you all of the times in various time zones. Haven't tested for the preciseness of the daylight savings switches, but seemed OK the last time around.

UPDATE: Does anyone know of a good authoritative list of time zones and daylight savings switchover dates?

Today, I experimented with taking pictures of strangers. I'm always impressed by Jim and iMorpheus' photos of strangers and I figured that the best way to get better at it was just to start doing it.

I had been practicing portraits on people I knew and thought that portraits of strangers should be fun. It was definitely harder than I had expected. I had asked a number of people their "secret". Some people asked before shooting, some people people fooled people into thinking that they were shooting something else, others were stealthy. I felt a bit "dirty" taking pictures of people sneakily. On the other hand, I didn't have the guts to go up to people and ask if I could take their picture. Some of the photos turned out OK, but it was a lot of work.

I am still not sure what my ethical position on photographing strangers is. Personally, I don't mind if people take my picture without asking. On the other hand I'm a weirdo. I've read a number of articles an essays about this topic and I still don't have a very good sense of whether it is cool or not to do it. I definitely think it's OK if you ask. My question is whether it is cool to shoot photos of people and post them to Flickr or our blog if they didn't give you permission. As far as I know, in most countries it's legal to do this.

Mizuka and I went to see my second cousin Keigo and his band (he's aka Cornelius) perform in Shibuya today. These Tokyo shows are sort of a family gathering and we got to see little Milo who had gotten a lot bigger and my aunt who appeared to be doing well.

The show was great as always. He played Wataridori which is one of my favorite songs and the song that he released under a Creative Commons license for the Wired CD.

He had some really cool videos using lots of low light photography and photo animation.

There was a bit where he had lots of old cheesy Elvis Hawaiian movie footage with Elvis' head/face covered by an animation of a sea anemone. It was really funny. Then he started playing "My Way" on his theremin.

There was also a lot of audience interaction and he took a group photo with the audience. He also took live video footage of the audience and did some video "scratching" a few times with it.

I had seats on the second floor and I was using a 90 mm lens hand-held so my shots of the stage are a bit crappy. I've posted my photos in a Flickr set.

I'll blog more of the upcoming events that I'll be attending at SXSW, but here's an important one.

CHALLENGE
We challenge you, our community, to raise $6000 for Creative Commons by subscribing to GOOD Magazine and having a drink with us at the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX. All it takes is for 200 people over the next 2 weeks to subscribe to GOOD. No, my math skills are not wrong. If you subscribe in the next 2 weeks your $20 bucks will be generously matched by Six Apart for up to $2000. So you won't just raise $4000 for CC but $6000.

DETAILS
Since July 2006, Creative Commons has been one of the 12 non-profits benefitting from the Choose GOOD campaign. GOOD magazine was started by some innovative people who have taken a non-traditional approach to promoting their magazine - and have experienced unbelievable success. The folks at GOOD have been traveling around the nation hosting parties and more importantly raising money and awareness for the non-profits that they support.

Over the past 7 months they have sold 11,899 subscriptions generating over $200,000 which in turn is gifted to 12 non-profits that are doing new, innovative, and great things. CC is one of them and since July GOOD has raised over $11,000 for us!

We need your help to make GOOD Magazine's SXSW party honoring Creative Commons the most successful party they've hosted to date. Cover charge is the $20 subscription fee and we strongly suggest emailing your rsvp to rsvp@goodmagazine.com.

If you want to help support CC and attend one of GOOD's infamous parties but do not reside in the Austin, TX area don't worry - your subscription fee gets you into any of the upcoming GOOD parties. And yes all parties are open bar.

By subscribing to this awesome new magazine you gain entrance to the biggest GOOD/SXSW party to date and you're helping us raise $6000 for CC. That money will support what we continue to do best - enable a participatory culture.

SXSW GOOD Party details:
with Special Guest Joi Ito, CC Chairman
VJ Phi Phenomenon
DJ Filip Turbotito
Ima Robot
ex Junio Senior

Monday March 12th
Uncle Flirty's
325 E. Sixth St. (on corner of Trinity and Sixth)
Austin, TX

This Event is for GOOD subscribers only

I'll be in SF tomorrow and will at the CC Salon. Come by if you have time. Here's the Eventful listing. Here's the info from the CC Weblog:

Creative Commons Salon SF Next Wednesday: Joi, John, Heather and Jim

Please join us for the first CC Salon of 2007 at ShineSF.com on Wednesday, February 21, from 7-9 PM in San Francisco. It will be major! And, yes, please note, we are not doing this event monthly now, but every other month to maximize the impact in SF!

The line-up for the evening:

* John Wilbanks, Executive Director, Science Commons
* Joi Ito, Web Entrepreneur, Chairman of Creative Commons Board
* Heather Ford, Executive Director, iCommons
* Jim Sowers, Calabash Music and National Geographic, Musical Guest, Discussing state of Digital Music and DJ’ing

Details

The event is free and open to the public. Quick presentations begin at 7 PM and go until 9 PM, but if you’d like to have an informal meeting or get a good seat, get there a bit early (We open the doors at 6 PM). So don’t worry if you’re late; there will be stuff happening all night at Shine, 1337 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets. Shine has free wi-fi and a super cool Flickr photo booth. Note: Since Shine is a bar, CC Salon is only open to people who are 21 and older.

Also, plug this event into your digital life on our upcoming.org posting.

About

CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, presentations, and performances from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and/or software. Please invite your friends, colleagues, and anyone you know who might be interested in drinks and discussion. There are now CC Salons happening in San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, Warsaw, Seoul, Brisbane, and Johannesburg. Read about the first Jo’burg salon on iCommons.org.

PS I'm still trying to figure out what to talk about. Any suggestions?

I've just been registered as a Performer on Eventful. If you'd like me to participate in some event, try using the "Demand me!" feature on the site. I've been messing around with Eventful a bit and it looks quite interesting. I'm going to try posting my public events using this performer interface.

I really wasn't sure what to expect in India with respect to my strict vegan diet. This was my third time, but my first time to visit as a vegan.

I am very sensitive to infections through the water and I ALWAYS get a bad belly, even when others don't. I've gotten a tummy ache every single time I've visited SE Asia including my two trips to India and my trips to Thailand and Bali. Because of this, I'm overly sensitive to drinking non-bottled water or things washed in non-bottled water.

This made it rather difficult for me because that ruled out salads and un-peeled fruits and veggies.

The net-net is, I ended up eating some not 100% whole wheat and rice products and consumed a bit of butter and cream as well. Also, some of the dishes were a bit oily. Having said that, I was able to find a number of dishes that seemed right on target and the fruit was great. I think my deviation was probably not that nutritionally significant.

What was the most shocking for me was how amazing everything tasted. I think this is in part because our vegan recipe repertoire is still rather limited and I tend to wolf things down with no seasoning at all when I'm busy. Every dish I ate was like an explosion of flavor in my mouth that sent me off on some sort of gastronomical journey. I don't think I ever appreciated Indian spices this much.

The menus almost always had more veggie dishes than carnivorous dishes and often 1/2 of group at any meal was vegetarian. They told me that some flights only serve vegetarian meals and some apartments don't lend to people who eat meat. Wow.

I am seriously considering whether there is some way for me to spend enough time among the microbes to build up an immunity to "enriched water" and eat in Indian with abandon.

Venkatesh was also explaining his meditation to me, which sounded great. I'm going to try to find some place to study.

Maybe I better go buy a tie-dye t-shirt and some Birkenstocks too. ;-P

John Brockman's EDGE asks a tough question every year. For 2007 the question was "What are you optimistic about?" My answer was:

EDGE World Question Center

Emergent Democracy and Global Voices

I am optimistic that open networks will continue to grow and become available to more and more people. I am optimistic that computers will continue to become cheaper and more available. I am optimistic that the hardware and software will become more open, transparent and free. I am optimistic that the ability to for people to create, share and remix their works will provide a voice to the vast majority of people.

I believe that the Internet, open source and a global culture of discourse and sharing will become the pillar of democracy for the 21st Century. Whereas those in power as well as terrorists who are not have used broadcast technology and the mass media of the 20th century against the free world, I am optimistic that Internet will enable the collective voice of the people and that voice will be a voice of reason and good will.

There are other answers from other people on the website.

Happy New Year.

I'm at Narita Airport waiting for my flight to Berlin via Frankfurt to attend the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress aka 23C3 as well as the iCommons board meeting. This is the third year that I've attended. It's one of my favorite conference with thousands of hackers converging on the Congress Center in Berlin. This year Digital Garage will be a sponsor of the conference and I will have a small team of folks including the MXTV BlogTV team covering the evening and doing some interviews. As always, the content will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution License and will be uploaded to You Tube and other places.

I'll be in Berlin until the 31st and travel back to Japan on New Years Eve just like last year. My big question is whether New Years Eve is including in the "end of the year" through which the in-flight Wifi is supposed to work.

This is the first flight I've taken since I started my ETL program and it's rather weird. Thinking about the logistics of getting tons of vegetables in Berlin feels almost upside down from the last time I went too. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it's a bit disorienting.

I am going to be flying on Lufthanza to go to 23C3. If I'm lucky I'll have Flynet (Boeing Connexions) wifi on both legs. It's suppose to terminate on the day I return from Berlin. However... I don't have enough Watts. The Lufthanza seats (as with most airlines) only do 70 Watts. My MacBook Pro takes 85 Watts and My Dell XPS M1710 130 Watts. Arggh! This is so frustrating... If you haven't experienced trying to draw more wattage out of an airline plug, it's a pain. It looks like it's working for a minute, but it will just shut down and the LED turns red when you try to draw too much power.

It may be because of all of the complaining from people like Larry, but Apple released an airline power cable for the MacBook Pro which allows you to plug it into DC Power connectors which most US airlines use. It doesn't recharge the battery and appears to solve the problem. However, this solution doesn't help you on the airlines that just have an AC power outlet. (Most of the rest of the world.)

I wonder if it's possible for the airlines to increase the maximum power on the seats. I sure hope so.

Yesterday Creative Commons celebrated its fourth birthday with parties around the world as well as in Second Life. Larry was in Portugal and I was in Japan so we hooked up with the party in Second Life. Board members Hal and Jimmy also joined us there together with a great mix of SL visitors and regulars.

In Second Life, Larry took the opportunity to pass me a digital torch as part of a ritual where he handed on the Chairman position to me after four amazing years as the founder-Chairman of Creative Commons.

When I joined the board in 2003, the licenses had been launched and the movement already had a great buzz of activity and good will around it. A the time, some products like Movable Type had already integrated Creative Commons licenses, but for the most part, CC was a movement of like-minded people with a vision. Since then Creative Commons, thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last four years, has become a standard feature in major search engines, web services, software tools and content libraries. In four short years, Creative Commons has grown from an idea to a basic part of the technical and business infrastructure of the Internet and the sharing economy.

One thing that needs to be clear is that I'm succeeding Larry, not replacing him. That's impossible. I'm jumping into the movement to try to help where I can and contribute to the leadership that Larry started. Larry remains fully committed as CEO. I'll try to give Larry more time to focus on his unique contributions to Creative Commons while I bring my own.

Creative Commons was and always will be a cultural and social movement which empowers people to share and promote free culture. In every way, it is "the right thing to do." However, Creative Commons has a new group of supporters. Many people now use Creative Commons because it makes business sense. The corporate world needs to hear this in a language they understand. I speak their language.

While I hope that Creative Commons T-Shirts will still get you free drinks in San Francisco, I think that Creative Commons will become a regular topic of conversation in board rooms, government policy meetings and living rooms of "normal people". As we lay claim to ubiquity, we need to step up as an organization and as a movement. I hope you will all join me in pressing on with renewed confidence and energy to make CC such a success that, as Larry hopes, people will look back and think that what we are saying now should have been obvious.

Please read Larry's post for his perspectives on this.

Finally I need to thank everyone for your support over these four years. It is through the broad grassroots support that CC has been able to port to over 70 countries, convince major companies to adopt the licenses and change their practices and become a key enabler of sharing and free culture. It takes real work and real money to build a movement like this. And the movement continues. Please continue to support CC and if you aren't already a supporter, it's a good opportunity to start. We've got $100,000 left to raise to meet our $300,000 goal for this fund raider. Your participation is essential to our success and contributing to our funding is an important part of this support. Thanks. CLICK HERE TO GIVE

UPDATE: Press Release

I just sent a bunch of joke gifts to people from Amazon.com. Now it thinks I'm a weirdo/nerd who buys Devo hats and obscure programming books. Too bad I don't have any more crazy friends that I need to harass.

So a word of advice to those who plan on sending joke presents for the Holidays. Don't use your main Amazon account. ;-P