The Worthy Work
Everyone, at least many people, like Anil Dash,(the majority I have never met but highly respect) seem to be asking what to build. Emma Irwin is looking to contribute to ten open source projects. Dave Winer ☮asked what he should build in 2016.
I had originally hoped, in fact I may have gone as far as asking, Alan Levine and Dave Winer ☮to work together and build me a remixable Stream.
I changed my mind. I want a different worthy project. (Still I am glad to see David Ascher and Tantek Celik looking forward to liberating the Stream.)
so that’s still worthy work. But I think I want something back even more.
In 2015 Remixing on the Web Took a Heavy Hit
We lost both Popcorn and Zeega. Mozilla had to concentrate resources elsewhere and the team behind Zeega was acquired by Buzzfeed.
These two apps represented something special. They unleashed the art of the Web by embracing remix culture. Each tool allowed you to take different sources on the web: images, video, sound, and make a derivative work. They were awesome.
We need the infrastructure to allow tools like these to flourish on the Web. Maybe it takes multiple partners. Using Flickr’s API to source images . Giphy is already everywhere (though attribution isn’t easy). Maybe DeviantArt makes the licensing of work easier to understand. Maybe someone forks makerba.se and creates a database of digital artists who allow their work to be used. Maybe YouTube gets serious about the Creative Commons licenses that users assign and allow third party derivatives.
Maybe it takes some new creative commons crawler (the CC search engine is close but I want it embedded right in the tool) that relies on some yet to be invented API that can categorize media by license and type. This is coupled with a remix interface…honestly I would just revive Zeega. The UI was so pleasing.
Maybe its a new browser add-on or extension that allows you to clip media from all over the web. You get a pallete and a slide deck. You can drag and drop and layer media as you surf the web. You sprinkle in some texts hit share and send your openly licensed work all over the web.
