PlanetPlanetPlanet and video.

Why have one when you can have three?

• Planet Wikimedia (you currently get on this by asking brionv; something more distributed to come);
• Wiki Blog Planet (you currently get on this by asking Nick Jenkins);
• Open Wiki Blog Planet (you get on this using the Edit This Planet link ... love it).

Short radio interview on Chris Evans' BBC2 show yesterday, 5:25-5:30pm. No idea what inspired it, it was utterly generic. I know the researchers love Wikipedia as the universal backgrounding resource, as journalists do. Wikipedia gets basically good press because we save journalistic arse on a daily basis.

Nice chat with someone from FourDocs yesterday, about freeing content or at least making it a useful resource for our projects. "We'd love our stuff on Wikipedia. It's all Creative Commons!" They've released a pile of documentaries under CC by-nc-nd, which is about as paralysingly unfree as you can get and still tag it CC. We talked about really-free-content licences — where you can take something and reuse and remix it, and even make money off the result, without prior permission — and how scary they are to those who've spent years learning the ridiculous twists and turns needed to clear a piece of footage for a single with-permission use.

That FourDocs could even manage CC-by-nc-nd with streaming only (not downloadable files) was remarkable given the state of movie copyright. Even the BBC, which is all about the content, has about half the staff keen to release everything freely and widely and the other half horrified at the idea.

Today's question: what the hell can we do to come up with something big content producers will feel able to release under an actually free licence? Something they can feel safe to relax control on? If we can get one, we can get more. What can we do to get that first one?

(Thanks for not much to Creative Commons. I see they even made some versions of CC by-sa 3.0 — not all, just some — not actually free licenses, with onerous codification of moral rights that are default anyway in the countries affected. Well done. And then you have wikis using licenses that are nonsensical in a wiki context — thinking a No Derivatives license doesn't contradict the whole idea of text anyone can edit, because it's Creative Commons. Stallman was right again.)

MISSING CATS HELLO.

Madam is found! I don't think I'd noted here that she was lost ... she didn't show up for dinner last Wednesday and was spotted by a neighbour last Friday morning. I blanketed the local area and around the old house with leaflets, and redcountess, arkady and I all worried sick about her and the other cats moped. But today I got a call from someone at Whipps Cross Hospital where she was hanging around the maternity unit (!). Arkady went to fetch her and she's now safely at home. And is not going out for at least this weekend!

There's no B-Movie tonight, but Arkady and maybe I will be going to Camden tomorrow afternoon and early evening. Any other suggestions of suitable entertainments?