mashup

Copyright Criminals, which airs its documentaries on PBS, has an upcoming show on the rise of sampling in hip-hop music. While, the documentary focuses on copyright laws covering music it's not too difficult to apply lessons learned for other content including text found on web sites.

You may notice that I currently don't specify a copyright or Creative Commons license on my site. Where do I stand on the issue? I pretty much follow US Copyright laws which basically says using excerpts from an article is proper but it's illegal, outside of personal use, to copy a full article without permission. In the end though, it's not the law that I rely on but each persons own moral compass. That seems to work for me. It's only in rare cases that I've found people stealing entire articles without permission nor giving credit where credit is due.

Copyright Criminals - Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.

Story found via Creative Commons

John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I especially not liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

These web sites will set further expectations on the internal systems you use and a requirement to integrate internal information with these external sources of information. Web 2.0 has an answer for this as well with an integration technique known as "mash up", the ability mix information from multiple sources using the web browser itself as the point of integration. These external sources of information also provide something that our internal information systems could never provide, a critical mass of opinion utilizing the Wisdom of the Crowds. We will ultimately need to combine external opinion with our internal opinion to get more accurate predictive decision making with our own unique insights inside the enterprise.

When I read what John has written, I can't help but think of our previous discussions on the strength of weak ties.  Companies that are willing to seek out knowledge internally and externally of their control boundaries are likely to have a greater business advantage over those companies that prevent their workers from taking the discussion beyond the office walls.  What a boring life that would be to only be able to talk to colleagues that wear only the same company logo you are wearing?  Companies need to accept the changes that are about to take place as their youngest workers will likely want and need to collaborate with more than just their fellow employees.  The world via social publishing offers their workers more than what most single companies can provide alone.