Saw this on the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights this morning, on my daily walk to work (teaching a class on Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"): a complete and pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana, tossed in the rubbish heap.
Score one more for Wikipedia.
Somewhere high in the Hollywood Hills, Steven Soderbergh is wetting his pants.
Yesterday saw a minor milestone in participatory culture: the online release of Elephants Dream, a community-financed CGI film made entirely using open-source applications, developed by seven artists around the world.
In addition to its OSS provenance, the film was released for free under a Creative Commons attribution license, so can be used by anyone in any way, as long as the original artists are credited with the end result.
The site's servers are waaaay overloaded (even though the film is a short, they released it in HD with 5.1 channel surround sound, so the file comes to hundreds of MBs), but fortunately, it was also released via BitTorrent, so I'm currently downloading at about 133kbps. I'll update once I've had a chance to download and digest the film.
UPDATE: Watched the film this weekend. It was beautiful to look at and completely impenetrable (at least, to me). Kind of like a cinematic sequence in an XBOX 360 RPG. Suffice to say, Hollywood's not in imminent danger of losing their audience to "open movies." Then again, they are in danger of losing their audience to XBOX 360 RPGs. So I guess it all balances out in the end.
