“web”

The test.

Logged in to your Flickr account, click on the YOU drop down menu and select Your Account.

Select the Privacy & Permissions tab.

Click the Edit link next to What license will your photos have.

You’ll now be presented with easy instructions to both select a Creative Commons license default for your future photo uploads and to change the license of all your existing photos. Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses for you to legally let others use your work on your terms. You can, for instance, require attribution, that no derivatives of your work be made, that your work only be used for noncommercial purposes, and that if others build upon your work they release it under the same terms you did.

So this is an easy way to free your photos, on your terms; to explicitly build the creative commons from which we all build upon. Expect thank you emails—from some website that needed a photo to illustrate an obscure Italian dish, from some gal who used your photo of your city in a brochure.

Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.

Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.

His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.

A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.

Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona (and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).

Web pages are written in HTML^WP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through Javascript^WP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.

It’s a little like writing French through English (André went to Marie and said: ”Bonjour! Ça va, ma chérie?”) and just as frustrating, particularly because you sometimes have to narrate whole scenes in French (pidgin tends to be painfully verbose) and your English self is left completely in the dark—so you end up naming things in both French and English and it gets as ugly as you can imagine.

The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):

function each(a, f) { for(var i=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };

each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(' '),

    function(label){

        window[label]=function(){

            var tag=document.createElement(label);

            each(arguments, function(arg){ 

                if(arg.nodeType)                                         tag.appendChild(arg);

                else if(typeof arg=='string' || typeof arg=='number')    tag.innerHTML+=arg;

                else for(var attr in arg){

                        if(attr=='style') for(var sty in arg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty];

                        else tag[attr]=arg[attr];

                };

            });

            return tag;

        };

    });

and you can play with it right here, right now:

Instead of

now it’s,

And so on.

Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:

“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”

“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”

I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)

To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodification^WP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!

Flickr AutoPagination has got to be the coolest Greasemonkey script I’ve seen yet, and, to judge by its code, a really intricate labor of love. It works flawlessly and does exactly what you’d guess: it makes every Flickr page (where it would make sense) “infinitely scrollable”. A cool, handy, and surprisingly stable script.