Last year, to commemorate the release of Firefox 3.0, I posted a heavily-annotated copy of Code Rush — the commercially-unavailable documentary from 2000 about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed Code Rush director David Winton about the film, who asked that I take the video offline while he decided what to do with it. Last week, he made a decision.

I’m happy to say that Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Winton and his colleague John Koten set up a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

They’re encouraging everyone to use the documentary in new ways, remixing or reusing the footage for any non-commercial use. In particular, I’d imagine the Mozilla Foundation should be very happy that they can finally use this historic footage of their origins.

Thanks to the new license, I’m able to put my annotated version of the film back up on Viddler. I’ve embedded it below. Update: Replaced with YouTube version, since Viddler is dead.

Best of all, David Winton’s announced that they’re planning on digitizing the original interview footage and making them available. “We are still working to get our hands on a digital Beta deck to digitize the original dailies, but hope to get up and running in a couple months.” If you can help them out, get in touch.

Update (August 6): I just discovered that unreleased footage from the documentary is being added to Archive.org.

Some news: I’m proud to announce that I’ve taken the CTO role at Kickstarter, the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding startup I’ve mentioned here before. Yay!

I’ve been on the board for the last 10 months, helping find the development team and providing some guidance on tech, design, and community issues. And in the last year, watching the site evolve was an amazing experience, from an idea to a website with the potential to change the way things are made.

Since our launch ten weeks ago, over $250,000 has been pledged to make everything from books, magazines, albums (and album reissues), plays, films, art projects, zombie iPhone apps, and more. (Not to mention, my own Kind of Bloop album.) And keep in mind, the site’s still invite-only!

Getting people to give you money is tricky, but I think we’ve hit on a formula for success:

• All-or-nothing. Projects are only successful if they reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, otherwise nobody pays. This limits risk for both backers and project creators, who don’t have to worry about committing money and time to a failed project.
• Rewards. We strongly emphasize the importance of crafting good rewards, which makes Kickstarter more like commerce than altruism. We support multiple tiers of rewards from $1 to $10,000, limits for each, and tools for creators to contact each tier group independently.
• Publishing. A simple and powerful reward is access to exclusive updates during a project’s funding and development, creating a powerful connection between the audience and project. As a result, we offer publishing tools for public or private updates, including hosted media and update notifications.

These mechanisms and constraints allow Kickstarter to not just fund projects, but test ideas, engage with an audience, and pre-sell your work without risk.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Guardian Activate Summit in London about the power of play and applying game mechanics to non-games — difficult problems like environmental change, political activism, and fundraising. Kickstarter turns fundraising into a social game, where people have to work together within a time limit to reach a common goal. Already, we’re seeing that projects develop their own viral momentum… Once a project hits 25% of its goal, success is almost guaranteed. (94% of projects that hit that mark eventually hit their goal.)

I look forward to pushing Kickstarter further in that direction, and build a platform flexible enough to do more than help artists raise money for themselves. I’d love to see more people use Kickstarter for commissioned works like Kind of Bloop, collecting the money to pay someone to make or do something you want to exist. Or anywhere you need to gauge market demand, like throwing parties without the risk of losing your shirt in ticket sales.

Soon, we’ll be opening the site up to anyone who wants to make a project — and that’s when things get really interesting. In the meantime, you can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.

So I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Like Jon Haddock’s porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something’s amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.

Can you name all 22 23? (Click any image for the answer.)

Continue reading “Meme Scenery” →

Update: Kind of Bloop is done!

Ever since Kickstarter launched, I’ve been trying to come up with a great project for it that plays to its strengths… I like to describe it as a site that lets other people pre-order your dreams — an easy way to get the people you know to fund your ideas into reality.

With that in mind, I just launched a project I’ve been dreaming about for years. The idea is Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, one of my favorite albums of all-time. I’ve always wondered what chiptune jazz covers would sound like. What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?

I’ve researched the topic quite a bit, and was only able to find four jazz covers ever released — ast0r’s version of Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, Sergeeo’s own Giant Steps cover, and Bun’s version of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. (If you know more, please let me know!)

So I asked ast0r and sergeeo, along with three incredible chiptune artists (Virt, Shnabubula, and Disasterpeace), to collaborate on a track-by-track remake of the album. I’m raising the money to legally release the album, pay the royalties¹, print a very limited run of CDs for Kickstarter backers only, and pay the artists for their hard work on these very challenging songs.

Read more about the project, and back it if you want to make it real.²

Update: We hit our $2,000 goal in four hours, so this project’s definitely on! That doesn’t mean it’s over, though… Anyone can still give money for the download or limited-edition CD. But I’m not planning on selling the album after the August 1 deadline, so pledge now if you want a copy.

Footnotes

1. This is my first time licensing music, and I’m frustrated that there’s no free, legal way to release this album for free download when it’s done. By law, you’re legally required to pay royalties for every download, whether or not you charge for it. Wouldn’t a percentage of revenue make more sense?

2. Some people seem to misunderstand what Kickstarter’s for, expecting it to work like Kiva, where there’s a pool of investors waiting for neat projects to throw their money into. In reality, I’d expect very, very few projects to be backed by random people stumbling on it from the Kickstarter website. It hinges on your own social network, your ability to promote your project, and the demand for what you’re offering. So if your project fails, it’s most likely because there wasn’t enough interest from the people you know.

I just received a very unusual, and refreshingly candid, message from a known scammer in Senegal. It started with a standard introduction to a 419 scam early this morning.

From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <[email protected]>

Reply-to: [email protected]

Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM

Subject: Hello My Dear one

Hello My Dear one

How are you and how is your work? i hope that all is well with you, My name is miss Jenifer , i know that you may be suprise how i get your email, i got your email today when i was browsing looking for honest partner,then i feel to drop this few line to you , and i will like you to contact me through my email so that we can know each other and exchange our pictures, and we maybecome partner.

Remember the distance does not matter what matters is the love we share with each other. i am waiting to hear from you soon.

kiss regards Miss Jenifer

About an hour later, I received a very unusual followup.

From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <[email protected]>

Reply-to: [email protected]

Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM

Subject: You Owe Me

Since you haven’t fallen for my stupid scam letter let me go ahead and be up front with you.

Because I am a Nigerian, you owe me something. The fact that my decadent forefathers sold their neighbors and relatives into slavery means that you owe me a lot of money, especially if you are white. I will accept $1000 USD from you per month for the next 12 months. That will settle your debt towards me that was created by our forefathers.

Moreover, it is imperative that you begin to acknowledge my inherited right to steal and be corrupt without oppression from anybody’s legal system. I am entitled to instant riches at the expense of everyone outside West Africa.

This starts with you, my friend, so start paying up now by Western Union.

As much as I’d like to think Jenifer had a nervous breakdown within the hour, it’s clear that it’s a different author. The writing style is completely different and the scammer’s from Senegal, not Nigeria.

I’m guessing an angry recipient hacked her Yahoo! Mail account and sent out the second message to discredit her. Any other theories? I replied to the email to get more details, but I don’t expect a response.

I’m very happy to announce that Kickstarter is live! I first mentioned the project back in September, and have been privileged to sit on the board and advise their development for the last ten months.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. Like Josh Freese and Jill Sobule, the site allows creators to have multiple tiers of rewards (e.g. $20 for the book, $50 for signed copy) with optional limits for each.

The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal’s reached by the deadline, then everyone’s charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal’s not reached, nobody’s charged. It’s all or nothing.

If you want to raise money to build an iPhone app, make a run of t-shirts, or print a book, you can do it with absolutely no risk or up-front costs. If there’s enough demand for your idea, you’ll be able to sell every copy before you’ve spent a dime.

Kickstarter also offers publishing tools, where creators can post project updates with audio and video, either publicly or for backers only. For projects without a physical reward, exclusive updates could be a great incentive for people to get involved. Check out this project for a good example.

Anyway, I’m thrilled to see what people come up with! For now, anyone can back projects, but you’ll need a Kickstarter invite to be able to create your own project. (You can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.)

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards are in, and browsing the list, I’m a little surprised at how much it’s grown. I remember the novelty of the first ceremony at Bimbo’s back in 1997, with its quirky five-word speeches and humble 15 categories.

I was curious to see the growth trend, so I tallied up the total number of categories on their official site. In the last five years, we’ve seen a 330% increase in new categories to a total of 129 today. In the chart below you can see the gradual rise during the dot-com era and brief reduction after the bust, only to swell along with the Web 2.0 movement. In 2005, with the introduction of the new Mobile, Advertising, and Film award types, the number of categories more than doubled to 63 and continued to expand every year since.

With so many categories, you’d think that their business model hinged on getting as many entries as possible… Which, of course, it does. Submitting an entry for Webby consideration costs $275 for the Website, Mobile, and Advertising categories, while the Film categories costs $195.

All of this reminds me of Cool Site of the Day, a former web mainstay that’s long since drifted into irrelevance. Once they started taking cash for consideration, the award became less meaningful and the picks were less interesting because of it.

At what point does the Webbys meet the same fate as CSOTD, where the only people who care about the awards are the nominees themselves?

Getting linked from a high-profile website is almost always a huge compliment, well-received by any blogger. But Monday morning, I saw two friends taken by surprise when they were featured on the front page of AllThingsD, the Dow Jones-owned news site edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal. I talked to Kara, as well as several other writers and bloggers, to understand why.

Background

After Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter’s article about URL shorteners was posted on AllThingsD, he asked on Twitter, “What the hell is this?” Danny Sullivan replied, “It’s a compliment. AllThingsD liked your shortener article enough to feature you on their home page.” Joshua responded, “It’s just very unclear to me where that came from, who wrote it, why they are showing ads on it, etc.”

Continue reading “Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital” →

I’m making the pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW Interactive again this year, but no crazy Worst Website Ever antics this time. But I will be speaking at a couple events, if you want to get together:

Sunday, 3:30pm

What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?

Lane Becker moderates a lineup of web geeks who started projects during the last bust, with some advice and lessons learned from our past success and failures. I’m very lucky to be on the lineup, along with the wonderful Ben Brown, Michael Sippey, and Jane Mount.

Monday, 7:30pm

The Heather Gold Show

Palmer Events Center, 900 Barton Springs Road

Every year, writer/comedian Heather Gold brings her live, interactive talk show to Austin to interview artists, musicians, coders, and writers around a theme. This year’s subject is “Something From Nothing,” a loose conversation about inspiration and the creative drive, with CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, Huffduffer creator Jeremy Keith, Adaptive Path founder/Emmett Labs CEO Janice Fraser, singer/songwriter Amber Rubarth, and me! The Heather Gold Show is a small part of the huge Plutopia EFF-Austin party, a three-stage art and music extravaganza featuring Bruce Sterling and Ian McLagan from The Faces, so should be fun. Free admission for SXSW badge holders, $10 for everyone else.

Naturally, I’ll be on Twitter and my picks for the show are on Upcoming and Sched.org. If you see me, say hi!

While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that’s completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.

It reminds me of the scanlation movement, in which groups of fans scan, translate, and redistribute manga into another language. But I’ve never seen it applied to a newspaper or magazine, especially one as high-minded as The Economist.

It’s an impressive example of online collaboration with simple tools, a completely non-commercial effort by volunteers interested in spreading knowledge while improving their English skills. In the process, they’re taking a political risk in translating controversial articles about their homeland behind the Great Firewall.

Continue reading “Translating "The Economist" Behind China's Great Firewall” →