Category Archives: free culture

rolfcon!!1!

Tim, Christina & co are up to some craziness back in Cambridge. On April 25-27, they will attempt to open the hellmouth:

This is the ongoing record of an effort to assemble every famous internet meme or celebrity to come to Harvard in the spring of 2008 to attend a conference.

Presumably, they’re going to talk about fame online.

:::ROFLCon:::

So far the guest list includes xkcd, dinosaur comics, the oneredpaperclip guy, and others. They get goatse and I’m buying a plane ticket.

To get you psyched:

Internet People


Internet People

Animation by Dan Meth
Music by Dan Meth & Micah Frank
From MethMinute39, CC-BY-NC-SA

Suggested Reading: The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

perkins & parkins

Altominarian Cutalfien


Altominarian Cutalfien
by Greg Perkins, a bicoastal buddy. His Flickr is getting pretty awesome these days… good things happen when people leave Cambridge for Cali.

[audio:silentstrokes.mp3]

Silent Strokes by Superhumanoids. Catchy, groovy, pscyh-pop – definitely a track for your makeout playlist. The human behind all this is Cameron Parkins, who interned at CC with me this summer, so I should add that its licensed CC-BY-NC for your listening & remixing pleasure.

October Update: California, Lampoon, Creative Commons…

Its been a while since my last post, but not for lack of things to say. Instead, my bandwidth for online activity has been consumed by two other endeavors. First, I gave the Harvard Lampoon website a complete redesign using Drupal. Its still very much a work in progress, and considering my attention span, it may stay as such for a while. But check it out, as we plan to update the content quite frequently (including comics illustrated by yours truly).

However, despite what my recent contributions to the Lampoon may seem, I am not back in Cambridge. My love affair with California is still going strong and I’ve decided to stay in Berkeley for the semester. Peace out, Puritans. Hello, beautiful hippie people.

And what have I been doing out here? Besides making lots of friends, art, and sourdough, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been hired as a Business Development Assistant for Creative Commons, the awesome organization I interned with over the summer. I blog for them a couple times a week, so that’s definitely been eating into the energy I have for this site. More to come on what else I’ve been working on there, but for now I should mention that we just launched our Annual Fall Fundraising Campaign, and along with it, a slick site redesign. Those of you already familiar with the great work CC is doing, consider making a donation!

Support CC - 2007

For the uninitiated, this video is a pretty good introduction to what Creative Commons is all about:

Opening Up To Open Access

Free Culture talk this Wednesday:

Opening Up to Open Access Flier

Governments worldwide invest billions of dollars in research every year. Yet the results of this research— a treasury of medical knowledge— are mostly privately owned and sold only to those who can afford the costly article fees or journal subscriptions. While there have been several movements in the scientific community to fix this problem, solutions for the social sciences and humanities have not been explored in depth.

Opening Up to Open Access
A Discussion with Gavin Yamey, Public Library of Science

Wednesday, March 14, 2007
7:30 – 8:45 PM
Sever 202, Harvard University

Cookies, brownies, and drinks will be served.

Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Public Policy and Harvard College Free Culture

For more information about PLoS, please see http://www.plos.org

flier
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Open Access Day & Linux Desktop Publishing

Open Access Day Bookmark (Harvard)Thursday was the National Day of Action on Open Access (I’m a bit late with this post). To celebrate, I designed some informational bookmarks for the Free Culture groups at Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern. We distributed a few hundred of them in college libraries. This was my first project using Inkscape and I am quite pleased with the application: simple, intuitive, well-documented, and open source. Vector graphics are a super way to work. One nice perk of Inkscape is the ability to cleanly export to Adobe Illustrator format, which hugely simplifies dealing with the printer.

In the spirit of the day, I used not only open source software, but also Open Clip Art and free fonts (Dustismo and Nimbus), so the project is totally free. I’m so glad that creating decent-looking desktop publishing on Linux is now painless. In 9th grade, I spent days trying to get pretty fonts to work with Gimp, and now they’re just an apt-get away. To be fair, that was 5 years ago and I had no idea what I was doing. But now I don’t need to know squat. Yay!