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Yahoo Adds Search for Creative Commons Content
BlakeCaldwell writes "Yahoo has added the ability to search specifically for content with unconventional copyright arrangements. The search tool was produced in order to help promote Creative Commons' efforts to advocate the use of nontraditional copyright arrangements between digital content developers and people interested in licensing those individuals' work. The group said that most of the content available through the Yahoo search can be licensed for free under required attribution or noncommercial usage guidelines." Commentary on Lawrence Lessig's Blog.
The former, I know, has explicit methods to label content as Creative Commons or other types of license.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
However, it's not clear to me how they decide what to index. There doesn't seem to be any explanation of that under Yahoo's "Learn more..." link. When I tested the Yahoo index, they had indexed this book, which was already catalogued on commoncontent.org, but not this one, which isn't. So are they simply grabbing everything linked to from commoncontent.org? In general, I don't see how this could really work well, unless they did something like what commoncontent.org gave up trying to do: let people submit listings, and then have a human check whether they're legit.
Find free books.
In my experience, I've hardly ever seen anything with a "Creative Commons" logo that wasn't a blog.
See my sig for a catalog that includes a lot of more substantial examples.
Find free books.
Another Wikipedian, a developer with Yahoo India, mentioned this on the Wikipedia village pump last night. Being that I handle the full-length music uploads almost single-handedly (you can see my progress here) I went and eagerly tried it out. The result was very disappointing. I searched for about 20 different songs on my wishlist (at the bottom of my user page. Most of the hits were mutopia MIDIs or bizticket e-donkey links --- eg, useless. So I search for the songs + (Ogg OR mp3). The only useful hits were to the Internet Archive and to the MIT free music site, both of which I have thoroughly plundered. So like I said, this was a sizeable letdown.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'm in the process of putting various EFL teaching materials and help for students on my website, all of which are CC copyrighted (attribution/share-alike).
Put identity in the browser.
My photos are under CC, but not listed in Yahoo. (In fact, most of the search results for "bloodgate" were not relevant at all...)
:)
Back then, when I choose a license, I tried to submit this to the CC database, but I never got it to recognise my work.
Now Yahoo! does not list it either, and to submit my site, I have to login to Yahoo! (WTF?).
images.google.com doesn't have them, either. I think something is wrong with my sitecode
Tels
Mozilla (Firefox) is to Microsoft (IE)as Google is Yahoo.
By pattern I mean waiting for the competition to come up with useful features, then copy them. Take IE7's anticipated new features for example. We've seen them done already, and done right, in Firefox. Just yesterday, Slashdot had an article up about how Yahoo's upping their email space to 1 GB, to compete with Gmail. But Gmail will still be better. POP3 access, and ads that are barely noticeable, excellent user interface... the list goes on and on.
My point is that Yahoo needs to make some innovations of its own, rather than duplicating what's already been done. Come back and talk when you've done so.
10100111001
I've often thought that an organized way of providing legal, free content to people would really help such things take off. irate radio is one such example, and although their client and featureset need an overhaul I use and appreciate it. It has the potential to evolve into something that could challenge commercial content distribution methods successfully, although I don't know if that is really their goal.
:-)
Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap, and don't know where to look for it. A search portal like Yahoo, which has an enormous weight of credibility as a "legit" internet entity, could really add some luster to the idea of free, community oriented licenses and copyright. If google did something like this, they could even link to commercial alternatives in the ads section
The thing is, I don't know how you cope with people who would want to poison the well, so to speak - put false identification information on their site, try to trick you into using something and then demanding $$, and all the other tricks that the world's ample supply of scum would think up. There almost needs to be some community "ranking" method, like site moderation, to keep those losers out. But then the incentive to abuse THAT system becomes high. Sigh.
Oh well. It's a nice idea, and may even stand a chance of working reasonably well. We'll just have to see what happens.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Some time ago, I've converted one of my sites/projects (and the works it contains) www.verbumvanum.org to the CC, but whatever I search with - verbum vanum, greek, latin, literature, thesises, etc. - nowhere is my site or any of the works to be found. I thought this searchengine would perform better then the one on the CC page itself, but no. I wonder how much they actually spidered the Net for it, and how much it's just a take-over of the not-to-good-working database of the CC?
Guess they still have a lot of automated indexing to do, or there is a bug somewhere...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Why wait? An active torrent tracker requires very little resources or bandwidth, and a well-coded page could even dynamically serve torrents with multiple redundant trackers, to distribute the load even more. The directory could be run in a wiki style, where initial seeders can describe the content they are adding to the network, and others can expand on that as Wikis go. All of this could easily be run on a couple small to mid range servers...no need for Google or Yahoo or some other potentially evil corporation to grab it. This is certainly community attainable. Why don't you pick up the ball? :)
Stasis is death. Embrace change.