First of all, Happy New Year. I hope you’ll have a great 2009!

For me it starts with fun news: This Wednesday (7 Jan) the Webby Awards will be in Berlin and I’ll be giving a (very) brief talk on Memes in Meatspace. Putting it together was good fun. I’ll post it after the event.

Why exactly the 2008 Webby Awards are in town in 2009 I do not know ;) But thanks to Upside for organizing the Berlin Webby Awards event and for inviting me!

Just a little heads-up: Over the holidays I’ll change my hosting to MediaTemple who I was told offer awesome hosting. From what I’ve seen they also offer much better value and service than my current hosting provider 1&1. That said, I expect there will be glitches during the change. My current server structure has been growing rather organically for years.

If something looks odd, maybe check back later. If it’s urgent, get in touch. In case the contact form shouldn’t work, use Twitter.

Thanks for the patience.

Update: Piece by piece, things seem to be falling in place. This blog is now running on MediaTemple’s grid hosting service; the 1-click install of Wordpress 2.7 on the server also worked a charme and so we now have iworkfortheinternets.com running on a neat new Wordpress.

The end of the year is always a good time to sit down for a few minutes and think back: What happened over the year, what worked out well (and what didn’t), what was surprising, new, mind-blowing?

Short version: It was an awesome year, thanks all you guys.

The longer version below will be more interesting for me than you, probably. If you skip this post I won’t be disappointed. I promise ;)

Waving cats in Kuala Lumpur. Some reserved: CC (ny-nc-sa)

So what happened this year? According to Dopplr, I went on 28 trips in six countries. My path has crossed with many a cool folks’ paths which I enjoyed a lot. (Still do, of course.) My sister got married, and several friends had babies (congrats!). The start of 2008 also meant saying goodbye to the small webdesign agency I had been running with my long-term friend and partner in crime Thomas Lacher. We had a great time, but after almost ten years it was time for both of us to move on and focus on our other projects, and I’m curious when we’ll be working together again. I switched to Mac, which even after, dunno, 16 years or so on Windows turned out to be surprisingly hassle-free. Oh, my blog got a new design and a custom-made logo. (W00t!)

And I’ve worked on a lot of projects with clients and partners old and new:

With the Netzpiloten I’ve worked on Blogpiloten.de, a German blog magazine. There, I started out as managing editor, then I moved on to project lead and could win Steffen Büffel to take over managing the authors, which has been a great ride. Expect news from Blogpiloten soon. Also with Netzpiloten, we’ve been working on a number of other projects, most of which aren’t public yet, but one we launched in record speed was a website for famous German comedian Thomas Hermanns: Für Immer Disco is his site about Disco Culture. I’ve been working with Netzpiloten for a couple of years by now and it’s always been a pleasure.

At UOC, a Barcelona/Spain-based university with a focus on knowledge society and virtual teaching, I was involved in a couple of projects, most notably a workshop on Web 2.0 in Education at the UNESCO Chair for E-Learning. Also, Max Senges, Thomas Praus and I have been writing an innovation newsletter for UOC (published here), which will really take off in 2009. Really digging my teeth into E-Learning was great - I also learned a lot, and the teaching community in this field is awesome.

For Golf- und Landclub Berlin-Wannsee, Germany’s top golf club, I’ve prepared a major website relaunch in cooperation with Panorama3000. The site isn’t online yet, but will be soon.

For London-based social media agency We Are Social I’ve helped out with the blogger outreach for Germany for Ford’s new Ka launch campaign. Germany is traditionally a hard market for those talking to bloggers. (Sometimes it seems to me that the German blogosphere is still in its infancy, and I wish German bloggers would look more strongly for input from outside Germany. We’ll see where it goes 2009.) With Hamburg-based Colt Communications we’ve been brewing up a fancy new project not to be announced yet. In cooperation with Panorama3000 I drafted a strategy for the European and federal online election campaigns for Jusos, the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD.

Thanks to my friends and office mates at Panorama3000, it has been a great year with you guys!

2008 was the year of liveblogging. I was hired to live-blog at SinnerSchrader’s next08 conference, T-Systems MMS‘ Dresden Open Space and Deutsche Welle’s blog awards The BOBs.

Speaking of liveblogging: Event coverage from insiders for insiders is what we’ve also been doing with Berlinblase.de. Together with the rest of the crew, we went to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, LeWeb Paris and several Barcamps and reported back to those who couldn’t join in. What started out as a little tumblelog has been growing into a full-blown site and team. What’s really great here is that this is a 100% passion project with no commercial interests. It just works, and the feedback has been great. (Thanks to the rest of the crew, and also to TechWeb, O’Reilly and LeWeb for the invites and your feedback!) In 2009 we’ll ramp up our efforts even more. Expect some cool stuff there.

Berlinblase also got a fair bit of media coverage. The other time I appeared on a media outlet was about Likemind, a monthly kaffeeklatsch I also just learned about this year and that I’ve been enjoying a lot.

Speaking of fun side projects, a few friends and I have been printing and selling shirts, mostly for fun, on two sites. First, keingeschenk.de (engl: “no gift”) is where we sell the designs created by my friend and office mate, freelance illustrator Matthias Pflügner. Even simpler (and feel free to clone away) is the geeky goodness of the I Work For The Internets shirts inspired by my co-conspirator Michelle Thorne. Good fun!

So where does that leave me now? I realized that this whole freelancing thing works well for me, I love my job. And even better, it also worked out from a business point of view. This is of course a great relief. So freelancing it is. For 2009 a bunch of projects is already in the making, it looks like it’ll be an intense and really interesting year. I feel particularly lucky and privileged that I can say this despite the recent economic slow-down out there. Again, a big Thank You to all those mentioned above, and also to those I haven’t mentioned but who made my year (you know who you are).

Now it’s time for a few days off over the holidays. There’ll be plenty of good food and quality time to spend with friends and family.

If you’re wondering how to spread some love, consider joining me in donating to Kiva.org. Even small donations go a long way there. What better gift to give than the initial budget for an entrepreneur in a poorer country who can then start a business that’ll help feed the family sustainably?

Happy holidays and a good start for 2009!

Over the last couple of weeks I could see the production blog of Same Same But Different - The Movie take shape in our offices. The Same Same blog has been online for a about a week now. (Full disclosure: The website is produced by Panorama3000 who I share office space with. I’m not involved in the project in any other way, and I wasn’t asked to write about it.) What struck me as remarkable when webdesigner and flasher Patrick showed me the site was how intensely the movie crew uses all the different channels and services.

Screenshot of the Same Same But Different Production Blog

Straight from their shooting locations (Cambodia, Thailand, Laos) they blog, shoot movies (duh) and put them on Vimeo, post photos to Flickr. Google Maps shows where the action is, and also shows all the posts about a certain town. All this stuff is aggregated and fed back into the site through Friendfeed.

That kind of integration isn’t particularly new in terms of technology, but it’s cool to see those tools being adopted so quickly and thoroughly by the crew on location. If they keep it up (which of course is hard to tell after just one week), it should be pretty cool to watch. Then it wouldn’t be the usual half-assed last minute marketing stunt to get some more people to watch the movie. The blog and all the surrounding services would be a complete documentary of the production process. This leads to a whole new level of transparency which I hope and believe we’ll see more and more of in the next few years.

Why is that cool? Except for being generally curious about how stuff works I’d guess there’s plenty of creative folks out there who could do all kinds of interesting stuff with this kind of material. Which brings me to the one thing I hope the producers will change: Could you guys release the blog, the movie clips and the photos under Creative Commons please?

Update: In her comment, Nicole pointed me to CCPlus, which seems to solve most of the problems laid out in this post. Thanks!

An open question: Would it make sense to add a layer of licensing (or rather: meta-licensing) to Creative Commons that would allow easier (speak: quicker) use of CC-licensed content for commercial use?

As this may seem kind of odd out of context (particular coming from a person who’s very much against overhead of any kind usually), please allow me to explain what I mean, and an example. What I’m talking about here is the commercial use of content licensed under the non-commercial license. (Yes, that’s right. Stay with me, I’ll explain.)

Also, please note that this is an absolutely open question, I am not sure myself which side I stand on here. If you know any pros or cons, please share.

On the right, Berlin Congress Center (BCC) where Web 2.0 Expo Europe 08 took place, and where we briefly discussed the issue after a Creative Commons presentation. Image by PinkDispatcher released under CC by sa 2.0.

 

The problem: Professionals can’t use CC non-commercial content

A lot of content that is licensed under CC is under the non-commercial clause, i.e. it’s allowed to use it for personal or other non-commercial uses, but not to make any money off of it.

How much content is released under CC non-commercial and how much under CC attribution (that allows for commercial use) I couldn’t find any info about, but a quick Flickr search for “Berlin” turned up these results: CC-licensed images: 2,153,590; out of those allowed for commercial use: 85,662.

(By the way, it’s not always easy to determine what’s non-commercial use, but that’s being discussed.)

So as a first step that’s good for all involved as more people can use those contents as long as they do so for personal or non-profit reasons. However, part of the charm of Creative Commons is that it allows amateurs as well as professionals to get more exposure while retaining some control over their contents and at the same time contributing to an ever-growing pool of accessible content that’s available for cultural production of all sorts. (Which is way cool, by the way.)

More exposure, to get to an example, could be having your photo printed in a newspaper.

The example: A journalist would like to use a CC-licensed photo

A journalist would like to use a photo licensed under CC. He favors free culture, but more importantly it’s much cheaper than running a photo from the wire and choice is much bigger. But the image is licensed under CC non-commercial, so the journalist needs to get the photographer’s permission to use it legally.

And here’s the problem - working under a tight deadline, it’s basically impossible to wait for the photographer’s consent.

The photographer, though, might love to see his photo in the newspaper. She wouldn’t mind making a few bucks with it, but it’s not her primary motivation to put the photo up. She just put it under the “non-commercial” license so that she’d get some control over who used it commercially. (She’d rather not have a large multi-national corporation run it on their ads.)

So what was intended to protect her photo from abuse turned against both her intentions and against the journalist.

Would another opt-in commercial layer help?

Maybe - just maybe! - another lay of meta-licensing would help. The option to say: I allow non-commercial use of my works for anyone. But I also wouldn’t mind commercial use as long as I can veto it in case the wrong folks want to use it. (”The wrong folks” here, of course, just meaning anyone the creator doesn’t want to be associated with.)

Creative Commons isn’t primarily about commercial success, but it sure helps the cause of CC to encourage commercial use. (The CC Casestudies Project collects CC success stories, also commercial ones.)

So how could this look like? Very naively, I imagine it implemented as a tickbox: Yes, in theory I allow commercial use of this photo, but only after I get notified first. As soon as someone wants to use it and clicks the corresponding button, please do send me a text message/email/whatever alert. This is a channel that I can guarantee to check with top priority, so that if I don’t veto the action within 30 minutes I agree to this photos use.

Of course there’s plenty of loose ends here and aspects not thought through to the end, and there’s plenty of arguments against this model. (Simplicity for one, and a more fundamental push for more open sharing.)

So the question is: Would this make sense for Flickr & Co to implement, and what speaks for and against it?

Joi Ito presented at LeWeb today. (Disclaimer: I’m a Joi Ito fanboy. Expect this to be biased.) He gave his presentation in his role as CEO of Creative Commons, the theme was “Sharing Love”.

Photo: Joi Ito at LeWeb by Peter Bihr (released under Creative Commons by 2.0)

Creative Commons, says Joi, is something like a protocol. He compared it to the TCP/IP of cultural production. It’s what makes systems and content producers and content users and whatnot interoperate. It provides the legal framework to lower transaction costs for content sharing and remixing and usage so that you wouldn’t have to spend tons of money on legal advice just to use a picture. Creative Commons make it easy, and legally safe, to share content and to allow use of your content under certain conditions.

Traditionally, you had either regulated or unregulated uses for, say, a book. Regulated: Read. Unregulated: Share, give away, sleep on it. In a digital work, it’s tough, as practically everything is unregulated. Every use means you have to copy it - in many cases you have to make several copies to use it just once.

The rest of the presentation covered the basics of Creative Commons: Why is it important, and how Creative Commons goes about providing a human-readable, a machine-readable and a lawyer-readable license (called “deed” here). He also mentioned the current CC Case Studies project, which shares examples of successful commercial uses of Creative Commons licenses.

Over at Berlinblase.de, we’ll be liveblogging LeWeb again. Please allow me to cross-post.

Good morning LeWeb! Those of you who haven’t made it to the MySpace party last night: Welcome back. For the rest of you, here’s the liveblog so you can follow the events from your desk, or your bed.

So what’s planned for today? Marc Canter will be moderating a panel on Platform Love, Robin Good will be speaking about the Love of Education, and Chris Anderson will be talking, too. Then it’s John Buckman (Magnatune), Dr. Brian Cox (Unicersity of Manchester), Maurice LEvy (Publicis), Marrisa Mayer (VP of Google) and Michael Arrington. Joi Ito of Creative Commons fame will also spread the love, before it’s even lunch time. Plenty to see, plenty to hear!

For some neat eye candy, go to Berlinblase.de/live where you’ll find the official video livestream on one side and our liveblog on the other.

Johannes said it and what can I say, it’s true:

die @berlinblase crew verwandelt sich mehr und mehr in einen haufen web 2.0 groupies. “OMG, hast du den gesehen?” #leweb ;-)

(Roughly: “The Berlinblase crew is turning more and more into a bunch of web 2.0 groupies. “OMG, did you see him?” #leweb ;)”)

So Sebastian took it to the next step. He had his brand-new Macbook signed not once, but twice. First, by David Weinberger. Then also by Hugh Mac Leod of business card drawing fame:

Image by Hugh Mac Leod, I’m blogging this. All rights reserved by the artist.

Here’s a video of the drawing (don’t try this at home):

Hugh MacLeod signing Sebastian’s new Macbook from thewavingcat on Vimeo.

Niiice.

From the phantastic guys of Soundcloud (Henrik Berggren and Eric Wahlforss comes a new neat little gadget: The Cloud Player.

Screenshot of TheCloudPlayer.com

The Cloud Player is a completely web-based audio tool, looking kind of like iTunes and with its basic features like smart playlists and shared playlists. The twist: It plays all the music created by the ever-growing community of SoundCloud. They built it as a little side-project over the last few weeks and just released it over the weekend. (Henrik kindly gave me a preview last week at Likemind.) And what can I say? I don’t know when these guys ever get some sleep in between running an up-and-coming startup, DJing, finishing a university degree and what not. But: It’s awesome.

Completely unfiltered, a slideshow with some of the pictures I’ve been taking at LeWeb 08.