Aral Balkan

Creative Commons (CC) is a wonderful initiative to make it possible for mere mortals to allow other such beings to make use of their works in ways that they deem acceptable. It is a system that is at once based on traditional copyright law and yet provides a modern alternative to it. Personally, I try to license as much of my work as possible under CC licenses. This includes the content of this blog as well as the collaborative work that comprises the OSFlash wiki.

For an initiative that aims to make it easy to share data and intellectual property, however, Creative Commons can appear, at first sight, to be very un-Web-2.0 [do not sue me O'Reilly]. A developer who happens to casually surf the CC website can easily leave thinking that the only way to integrate a CC license into her web application is to use an ugly HTML-based system that requires users to be redirected to the CC website. She may be left thinking, as I was: "Where is my open Creative Commons API?"

The good news is that it exists. The bad news is that information about it (and other APIs) is well hidden!

Here are three relevant links where you can learn about the Creative Commons REST API and other developer aids:

• Creative Commons Developer Aids and APIs
• Creative Commons Web Services (REST API)
• APIs for Creative Commons license metadata

And here are a few other links to important Creative Commons pages:

• Main Creative Commons page for developers.
• Using Creative Commons metadata.
• CC Tools: Tools to tag and verify Creative Commons-licensed works

The Creative Commons initiative is currently lacking two important things: The first is widespread support for embedding Creative Commons licenses in third-party applications and the second, and most important thing, is a solid search solution for Creative Commons content. There are several search solutions for CC content but none of them provide an easy means to narrow down a search by license. Hopefully, better visibility of the developer APIs will spur new developments in these areas.

FlashMagazine just published a review written by veteran Flash developer and my good friend John Dalziel of the panel on "The Future of the Internet as an Applications Platform" that I was on at Adobe Live.

I've received spam messages with some really weird subject lines but one that made it through my filters today appears to be no less than a personal attack: "Those who can't write, write help files"

I just had a heck of a time embedding a SWF file (the YouTube video from the previous post) into my WordPress post. Even when using the plain HTML editor, WordPress apparently does funny things to my HTML. Grrr! Feels like I'm using FrontPage or something!

Anyway, so I figured out that the problem was because WordPress was trying to convert the quotation marks in my code to smart quotes. Lovely! This was, of course, messing up the JavaScript required for SWFObject. So I tried putting the contents of the script tags into HTML comments, thinking WordPress might ignore the comments. And it did. But it also munged my newlines, thereby actually commenting out my JavaScript code. Grrr x 2! Finally, I got it to work by using multiline comments.

Here's the resulting code that worked:

<div align="center" id="flashCaptPicard">
    You need the Flash Player to view this video.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
    /*<!--*/
    var so = new SWFObject("http://www.youtube.com/v/2CTB6Lklpik", "flashCaptPicard", 425, 350, "7");
    so.write("flashCaptPicard");
    /*-->*/
</script>

I just saw this on Digg: A Processing applet that graphs out a visual representation of the structure of web pages. So I ran it on some of mine:

Let's start with this site. It would be interesting to compare it to other WordPress sites.

Here's OSFlash:

And the London MMUG (ooh, those tables are showing in the VBulletin engine):

And, finally, Ariaware: