Maj is doing the rounds at the Mesh Conference this morning, so I'm back at the hotel with the baby until lunchtime. I'm kind of happy about the situation; it gives me some time to catch up on my mailing list reading.
I was particularly interested in this cc-ca post by Russell McOrmond. Russell manages the great http://www.digital-copyright.ca/, which is an excellent clearinghouse for digital rights issues in Canada. He spoke at the madhouse panel at Copyright 2005 where I thought he was one of the more excellent speakers.
Anyways, I'm interested to see that rights to creative use of works are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 27:
- Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
This is true. It's a human right to participate and build upon the collective culture of our community and of humanity. Technologies and policies that abridge this right are faulty and oppressive.
digital rights russell mcormond canada
Accordion Guy
I forgot to mention that we spent some time at Mesh talking to Joey DeVilla, the Accordion Guy. He was wearing a huge accordion, which he'd been carrying around all day. If I ever get a gimmick, I'll tell you, it's not going to be carrying around a back-breaking miniature piano on my belly all day. Maybe I should register "The Feather Guy" or "The Guy Who Doesn't Carry Things".
The Accordion Guy played "The Hokey Pokey" for Amita June, which she enjoyed but couldn't participate in fully as she doesn't know right from left. Still, fun time.
Reorganize
I managed to get WiLiKi to recognize pages with slashes in the name, so now I've got a virtual sub-directory "Journal/" for all my journal entries. This is definitely going to help in making the $$tag macro to tag different pages. It looks like it might be possible to define a virtual page by regex, so that Tag/X is a virtual page listing pages with that tag. I think that'll be really cool!
The reorganization seems to have mucked up my RSS feed, and it looks like I accidentally spammed Planet Debian but I think that'll settle out over the next couple of days.
Tags
I figured out how to add tags to WiLiKi. I skipped the afternoon sessions of Mesh (mostly marketing and business stuff... I met a couple of the presenters and got a bad vibe off of them, so I decided to spend the time hacking WiLiKi instead).
Anyways, I've now got a tag reader macro that generates proper rel-tag tags, and a virtual page macro that does a reverse lookup for pages tagged with this or that tag. All in all, very useful, and I'm interested to see what will happen with Technorati and other tag-aware search systems.
tag wiliki customizations rel-tag
CC Salon Toronto
So, we had the CC Salon Toronto tonight, and it went off great! We had a ton of people there, from all walks of life in the digital world -- bloggers, activists, the curious, the very small (Amita). The Elephant and Castle turns out to be a very cool space, and the beer and snackos were very nice.
Best of all was talking with people that I've been admiring from afar for a while, like Marcus from CC.ca and Ren from EFF. Good to get so many clued-in people together in one room.
I'm hoping this can be the start of a Salon movement across Canada. We have so many cool cities here, with so many faceted creative communities -- having them tied together with a Creative Commons underpinning would be a real boon. Pictures to follow soon, thanks to all who came, or thought about coming, and who'll come the next time and the next.