I've just uploaded the 50 min special produced by Digital Garage and directed by Hiroyuki Nakano for MX TV (and the Net.) All of the content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. It is a 308 MB MOV file / iPod Video file. This 50 min show is a warmup for a weekly 30 min live show that I will be doing from July. The master is in HD format and I'll upload it at some point.

This show is about Creative Commons and has lots of scenes of me just talking about stuff. It includes a walk-through of my house and is Joi-centric. Sorry. ;-P It's also in Japanese. We're going to possibly make and English sub-titled version. If anyone wants to help, let me know. Since it is CC-BY, feel free to chop it up and do whatever.

Hiroyuki Nakano is a well know director famous for doing the DEEELITE music videos, Samurai Fiction and many other amazing video pieces and it was a huge pleasure to work with him and also watch him get switched on to CC. We tried to figure out the best way to do attribution in video. Thoughts on the icons and format would also be greatly appreciated.

It will air on MX TV 29.April 2006 2100~2155.

UPDATE: If anyone decides to edit it, can you replace the credits at the end with:

Produced by Digital Garage
Peacedeliced by Hiroyuki Nakano
Directed by Shuichi Fujiyasu

I'm going to fix it in the next version, but I'm leaving the current one up there until I do.

Wagner has posted the transcripts from Mia Garlick talk about Creative Commons. Thanks Wagner! it was a great talk and Wagner did a nice job capturing it for the web.

Our World of Warcraft guild has been running Molten Core (one of the end-games) on weekends. We now have a fairly reliable turnout of 40 people for the raids and have started making progress with the bosses. We cleared Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas and just took down Garr. (smallish mov / bigger avi / 270MB hi-quality mov) It took us a few tries and isn't as easy (especially the setup) as it looks in the video, but it should be pretty easy from now on. We seem to have our communications and planning relatively organized now and with the help of some of the more experienced players should be able to keep moving until we hit a boss that requires us to get new gear. What is interesting to me about these raids is the combination of preparation, planning and real-time coordination necessary to execute properly and I imagine how these skills could be used for conducting other sorts of activities.

The last time I was in Shanghai was in 1981 as part of a Nishimachi International School field trip. So... things have changed in 25 years. ;-)

The architecture and the restaurants reminded me of stuff in Japan during the bubble. Everything was experimental, well designed and executed. Although it reminded me of some of the "bubble era" architecture of Japan, much of it had more class.

I visited Augmentum, Leonard Liu's software company. (I wrote about Leonard before.) The company is only just over 2 years old, but it's booming and was in the Red Herring Asia's Top 100 this year. He has hundreds of people working at Augmentum, most of them fresh out of college. Leonard has been recruiting the best and brightest from Chinese universities and it shows. Since most of their customers are currently in the US, everyone speaks English in the office. It was great seeing how motivated, proud and focused everyone was. Considering the difficulty we have finding great people in the US for the various companies I work with, seeing all of these bright people ready to go made me quite envious. Leonard is an amazing and natural leader and his guru-like presence together with these eager minds made me feel like I was watching the beginning of something really big. Anyway, you can tell I was impressed. ;-)

I also met up with a bunch of old friends as well as CEOs of some very cool startups, the food was excellent and overall I now see how people kept telling me to go to Shanghai. I'm sure I'll be back there soon. Thanks to everyone for all of the hospitality!

One of the guys I met at Augmentum took me to the airport on the Maglev. I takes 7 min to go 30 km and hits a top speed of 431 km. Japan has a Maglev, but it's still running as a trial. This one in Shanghai is the first production one I think. Many people say that the reason the Chinese chose not to buy the technology from Japan was because of the political tension between Japan and China. I could imagine that being true. Having said that, I don't really care. It worked and it was great. I took some video. (m4v / avi).

I can't get to my personal email server from Shanghai so if you have sent email to one of my other accounts and need to reach me urgently, please send it to joiito at gmail or joi at technorati.com which are both working.

Second Life Forums

CREATIVE COMMONS: Copyright Basics

Date: Thursday, April 20, 2006
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM (60 minutes) [PST]
Location: Kula 4 (75,75)
Host: Genevieve Junot
Category: Education
Cover Charge? No

Event description: Mia Garlick, Creative Commons' General Counsel, goes in-world to discuss copyright issues, and the "Some Rights Reserved" licensing perspective.

Please join us at our new location on Kula Island! We will reserve some some for a brief Q&A session after the presentation.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. We have built upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach. We're a nonprofit organization. All of our tools are free.

http://creativecommons.org/

I'm not sure whether I can be there or not but it should be interesting...

UPDATE: I'm pretty sure I can be there.

Laurie Racine showed me a very nifty site that allows people to subtitle videos in various languages. I SO want my TV show stuff set up like this. It make sense to make the content some sort of derivative works permissive CC license because translations are derivative works as far as I know. The site is called dotSUB.

Had our first meeting inside of Second Life today to talk about the island. Thanks to everyone who showed up. Special thanks to Aimee Weber who donated an amphitheater! She showed me how to play videos inside of Second Life. So... I tried making a very recursive video of me watching a video of me watching a test video of myself. Watching a video together inside of Second Life actually works well. The audio and video quality is excellent and you can chat about the video and other things while you watch. It's really neat sharing a space like this together...

I uploaded a video iPod format m4v and a AVI format of the movie. Too bad the audio does't work... or for your sake, maybe it's better that it didn't.

Have started working with Justin... or rather Justin has started working on editing video. I'm about to learn to use Final Cut Pro and turn this blog into a video blog. ;-)

Justin Hall @ blip.tv

Open Source Physical Objects: Limor Fried and her x0xb0x Synthesizer

Open Source Physical Objects: Limor Fried and her x0xb0x Synthesizer - a conversation between hacker/artist Limor Fried ("Lady Ada") and Joi Ito with Phil Torrone of Make Magazine. Fried talks about her popular x0xb0x synthesizer kits, and the increasing elaborate revisioning of the product that's coming from her users. With Ito and Torrone, she proposes that this is a promising model for "open source physical objects" - extending the permitted hackability of software to hardware. This is an interview from South by Southwest: Interactive, in March 2006; the camera was held by Merci Hammon, the editor was Justin Hall, and Joi Ito was the executive producer - this is part of a series of videos released online from that event under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

I heard an interesting theory that I'd love for any Japan experts to confirm or debunk. Apparently, during the drafting of the Japanese constitution, the phrase "freedom of the press" was proposed by the US team. This was a big problem for Japan which had never really allowed any free speech. Instead of translating it as "freedom of the press" in terms of free speech they changed the meaning to freedom of "printing press" sort of press.

Later, there was a movement to prevent consolidation of power in press, but instead of making meaningful unbundling, the then Minister of Communications, Kakuei Tanaka, reinterpreted this initiative and broke up the licenses for local newspapers and TV to be delineated by prefecture (voting units) and made sure that the media in each prefecture was owned by someone affiliated with the ruling party. They also allowed the newspapers to own the television allowing the state (the ruling party) to essentially control the media.

Things are of course changing, but if this is true, this does explain a lot about the Japanese media...