I was given interesting business card just the other day – it had ‘standard’ details on one side, but a tweet about the card’s owner on the other. I was reminded of this card when I came across TweetCC today, which allows you to license your tweets (they’re your intellectual property, remember) using a Creative Commons license.
The idea came to the founders, Andy Clarke and Brian Suda, based in well-known European tech hotspots Wales and Iceland, following a conversation on Twitter between them. Andy wanted tweets and avatars for a new book. His publisher needed him to get permissions to republish and that meant asking everyone. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, a pain. Brian agreed.
They thought: “It would be nice if twitter could allow for a CC or other license on your content, then people don’t have to ask.”
So TweetCC.com was born this morning. You can also follow @tweetcc on twitter, of course.
Okay, done. ;)
So, was this story nice, or too extreme Marc?
We have some stories coming up that don’t mention Twitter, but it just happens to be an area where there is a lot of activity and interest at the moment. This story is also really about TOS and privacy, which are certainly in the news today.
We’re planning to do a few polls and ask for more feedback from readers in the next little while, and criticism and feedback is very welcome. We don’t know we suck until people tell us that we do, but we do pay close attention to what people read, tweet about and link to on this blog.
It’s nice that this blog spends so much time on topics about Twitter, but it tends to go a bit into the extreme. It almost seems that one out of three posts is about Twitter (or a company who uses the Api of Twitter). We can almost call it the NextTwitterWeb.com or something like that… Disappoints me a bit.
Is a CC licensing on your tweets really needed? Isn’t that stuff covered by “citation rules”?
Marc, no problem.
I took your remark as critical (and constructive) feedback – no taken offense at all!
Nice to hear you prefer The Next Web’s writing style to that other blog.
Hi David, maybe I sounded offensive, but it was more meant as critical feedback. Personally I’m not really into Twitter, so maybe that’s why it attracted my attention a lot was written about it lately. Next to TNW I’m also reading Techcrunch and it seems they deal with a broader range of web 2.0 businesses. I like the writing style at TNW more though, to also give positive feedback.