Creative Commons

Creative Commons seems like a great concept to me.  So often copyrighted material online is used completely illegally, without permission from the owners or anyone involved with its creation (pirating, unauthorized distribution, etc).  It believe that the CC license is a great way to sponsor collaboration between artists and creators, and can ultimately produce works that outclass anything the original creator of a CC product could ever have imagined.  Music and visual media seem to be the most common uses of such a license, but I can think of many different ways that it could be applied to topics such as writing, as well. 

I've heard of round-robin stories, which allow for many different writers to create a story together, taking turns per chapter, or something similar.  CC could allow some writers to embellish or expand upon CC'd material, to create their own version of a story, or to tell their version of what happened to characters after the CC'd story ended.  For journalistic writing, CC may allow further distribution and proliferation of your work while still maintaining credit for it. 

I'm not sure I understand all of the ins and outs of Creative Commons yet, but it seems like a great concept that could be put to great use.

That being said, perhaps I wouldn't want some written material of mine to become creative commons.  If I retained credit for the original work and someone modified it into something that is of inferior quality to the original, it may be difficult for a reader to tell which parts were mine and which were the contributor's, making me look bad in their estimation.

Google Reader

RSS feeds are something I'd never heard of before this assignment.  I'd seen the orange symbol floating around on different sites for some time, but never really decided to look into it further.  It seems like a really cool concept: I know that when I have a few minutes with nothing else to do, I flip through bookmarked web pages compulsively just to see what's new, even if nothing is.  This might help save me a bit of time and effort, if I can find which sites I frequent use RSS.  It's nice to be able to see at a glance the headlines of all of the niche news sites I visit.  It's definitely a tool I think I'll play around with some more.

Professionally, I think that this could be used in a number of ways, particularly for PR or Advertising majors.  You could keep in touch with world news and stay up to date with cultural, worldly, and pop culture trends.  Additionally, you could track web pages of clients/pages that are surfed by target demographics to see how best to appeal to them.  For those that read a number of blogs, this is a great help as well, just loading up one page to see what's new with all of them.

Delicious

This seems like an incredibly useful tool.  I've been meaning to start up a Delicious account for a while now, so this was a good excuse to get into the habit.  What seems most beneficial about this site to me is for cataloging interesting sites or articles that you stumble across on the web that you don't visit regularly, but would like to keep track of.  With a nicely tagged catalog on Delicious, you can easily access those sites for reference or to show to friends.


In terms of using a Delicious account for college work, it may be most beneficial for people working on research papers who reference a number of online sources, or for those planning larger projects in order to keep track of all of the urls and sites that may slip your mind.  My fiancee is currently using her Delicious account to plan tons of different things for our wedding: dress ideas, catering options, decoration colors, furniture for our house she finds online, whatever.  Seems like a really handy tool I'd like to start using more often.

Delicious username: chrisstoner