Livefyre, which you may notice provides the commenting system we use here at The Next Web (this is our full disclosure), announced this week that is has launched version 2.0 of its product, as well as a round of new funding led by Greycroft Partners.

The company tells us that the service has grown to an install base of over 14,000 sites since its original launch, and has been popular with individuals as well as global publishers like ours.

Sites installing Livefyre are seeing some measurable results on average, the company says, including:

• 25% increase in page views
• 52% increase in comments per page
• 20% increase in time on site

Other sites using Lifefyre include BlogHer, and The Sun.

Real-time commenting does indeed keep people on a site longer, because it isn’t static and boring. With version 2.0, Livefyre has added more social features such as profile pictures of users “listening”, meaning people on the page at that moment, as well as up to the second updates on new comments.

We asked Livefyre’s CEO Jordan Kretchmer a few questions about the company’s growth and why its different from most commenting systems.

TNW: What is LiveFyre’s biggest differentiator?

Jordan Kretchmer: Our focus on real-time participation creates a completely new kind of social experience for commenters and bloggers right on site content. That’s really the key here – we differentiate on sparking and fostering participation on YOUR site, instead of pushing it off to a social network. But to go one step further – we bring relevant conversations from around the Web back to your site, too. We help turn blogger and publisher content into the conversation hub.

TNW: What have you done that others have failed to pick up, what’s your leg up on competitors?

Jordan Kretchmer: From the very beginning, we put a premium on user experience, making commenting an active and surprisingly fun experience. Our social features, like SocialSync™ and FriendTagging are industry firsts, and we have plenty more exciting features like that up our sleeves. We are constantly innovating on how people can interact with site content and with each other.

TNW: Do you find that social media platform comments are pushing Blog commenting away from the norm? ie: Tweets and Facebook comments

Jordan Kretchmer: I think that external social media platforms have changed people’s’ expectations of how they want to interact with one another. Our goal with Livefyre is raise those expectations even higher by expanding on what those external networks have done, all right on the publisher’s site. For example, the ability to tag friends from all of your social networks, and from other people in that site’s community, is unique and powerful. Livefyre in essence connects me, to my friends from everywhere, to the content I like to talk about.

TNW: What is the first thing you’re doing with funding? What is the funding for?

Jordan Kretchmer: First thing we’re doing with the funding is rounding out our product engineering team, and growing our sales and business development practices. The net result of that is that you’ll start to see us adding new features faster than ever, and you’ll start seeing more of the little “Powered by Livefyre” logo all over the web. And soon.

It sounds like Livefyre is ready to battle a war with competitors such as Echo, Disqus, and even Facebook who has its own embeddable commenting system for blogs and publications.

The photo accompanying this article has nothing to do with the actual written content. Sort of. It’s a photo that I came across on Flickr, taken by Ben Fredericson, and being a sucker for bokeh I saved it on my computer.

The photo was posted on Flickr under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to use it pretty much any way they want to, as long as they credited the photographer.

This is possibly the simplest, and most common, way in which Creative Commons comes into play on a daily basis on the Internet. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

What is Creative Commons?

A lot of people probably don’t know that Creative Commons is actually a non-profit organisation. Based in Mountain View, California, Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by  Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred, in an effort to make creative works available for re-use. Creative Commons’ slogan sums it up perfectly, “Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally.”

Creative Commons encourages artists and creators to share their work under a Creative Commons License. This is where it starts to get a bit complicated because there are several permutations to the license, and you have to understand each one before deciding which one is right for you.

Creative Commons Licenses

There are six main types of Creative Commons Licenses.

Attribution: This license gives over the most rights possible. It lets your share, remix, and build upon the work, as long as the rights holder is credited. You can also use the work for commercial purposes.

Attribution Share Alike: This license is identical to Attribution, with the added condition of licensing your new work under the same terms. This is the license used by Wikipedia.

Attribution No Derivatives: This license allows you to share the work, both commercially and non-commercially as long as it is unchanged and is credited.

Attribution Non-Commercial: This license allows you to remix, tweak and build upon the work, as long as it is credited and is for non-commercial purposes. The new work does not have to be licensed in the same way.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike: This license is identical to Attribution Non-Commercial with the added condition of licensing new creations under the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: The most restrictive license allows you to share the work, as long as it is credited, non-commercial, and is not altered in any way.

It should also be understood, before choosing to use a Creative Commons license – it is non-revocable. If you choose to allow people to share your work, and decide at a later point in time to remove the license, any copies that exist in the wild, will stay right there. You can’t stop people from using them. Which in reality means that even under the most restrictive license, once your image is out there, it’s out there for good. Removing the license only stops users from downloading your copy.

What is the difference between Creative Commons and Public Domain?

Public Domain and Creative Commons are not to be confused with one another. Works in the Public Domain are free to use without any restrictions. Shakespeare and Beethoven’s works are an example of literature and music which exist in the public domain. An creative copyrighted work enters the public domain a certain number of years after the creator’s death, but the exact time period differs from country to country. For example, works in the US are copyrighted for the life of the author, plus an additional 70 years after death.

Works in the public domain can be used in any way you want – sharing, remixing, adapting – the sky is the limit. Just like with Creative Commons, the ability to produce derivative works is a catalyst for creativity.

Where can you find Creative Commons content?

Creative Commons content can be text, images, videos, software – in other words – just about anything. So where do you go to find that content?

Videos

YouTube recently introduced a creative commons licensing option for its users. YouTube is providing only one Creative Commons license, namely Attribution, the license which gives pretty much free reign over what you can do with the content.

Go to YouTube’s Editor where you can access a fully searchable database of thousands of videos contributed from YouTube users, as well as organisations such as Al Jazeera and Voice of America.

In addition, YouTube makes it easy to edit, rotate, combine, remix and add effects to the videos right there on the site.

Video artists and citizen journalists both have a lot to gain out of this move, and it’s a perfect example of how Creative Commons is a breeding ground for creativity.

When sharing your creations on YouTube, you can also license the video under the same terms, even though you aren’t obliged to. If used the right way, we could end up with a domino effect of hundreds of thousands of videos all licensed under Creative Commons freely available on YouTube.

Photographs

The most obvious place you can go to find high quality Creative Commons photos is Flickr. With almost 190 million photos and counting on Flickr, it’s interesting to see which types of licenses are most commonly used. With about 55 million photos each, Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives and Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike are the most popular options.

It is understandable that an artist or photographer would not want their work to be used commercially without payment. But for bloggers, non-profit organisations, and even digital and photo-manipulation artists, there’s a wealth of images to choose from. And with the help of third-party services like Compfight, it’s even easier to navigate the smorgasbord of awesome photographs.

You can also use Google  to find Creative Commons images, amongst other things. For images, go to Google Image’s Advanced Search, and at the bottom of the search form, go to Usage Rights to choose from several options in the drop-down menu.

Text

Besides the obvious example of Wikipedia, there are other content providers who have licensed their work under Creative Commons, such as Al Jazeera Blogs. Al Jazeera has been at the forefront of making all of its content available for re-use, including videos on YouTube and photographs on Flickr.

Other examples of text freely available online for re-use including WikiTravel, as well as a long list of fiction and non-fiction books.

Audio

Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor is one of the musicians who has always been far ahead of his time in the way the band’s music is disseminated, and has even earned them the label, The First Open Source Band. Nine Inch Nails released the creative commons album Ghosts I-IV in 2008.

The experiment didn’t do much for the music industry’s claims that peer-to-peer file sharing is detrimental to their sales. The license that Nine Inch Nails chose for the album allowed users to share it in any way they chose, as long as it was non-commercial. Meaning if you wanted to put it on the ThePirateBay, so that others could download it from you, you were free to.

Despite that, the album earned $1.6 million in its first week alone, and topped Amazon’s list of best-selling albums for the year.

They also created something of a film festival, inviting fans to create videos accompanying the music.

How does Creative Commons make us more creative?

Nine Inch Nails’ move with their Creative Commons album and film festival is the perfect example of the positive effects of the practice. Using their fame and fan-following, they were able to spark an artistic movement.

If a photograph, a work of art, or even software, is licensed under Creative Commons, it gives other users a springboard to work from. It’s the encapsulation of inspiration.

When you can create derivative works from a photograph, for example, it becomes like a creative brainstorming session, where two people can contribute to one work of art, regardless of their location, nationality or even language.

If a writer licenses their work under terms which allow for remixing, an indie film-maker could potentially create a movie based on the work. That kind of access to creative information to work with is priceless.

Because of the non-commercial aspect, Creative Commons can also push us to create art for art’s sake, and no other reason.

In other words, Creative Commons brings out the best in us.

As the new year begins, here are five trends that are likely to make an impact in the online media world in 2011.

Cloud-based media libraries

The idea of ‘iTunes in the cloud’ has been floating around for years and despite rumors throughout 2010, it hasn’t materialized yet. In 2011, we’re likely to see the idea of a personal music library you have access to anywhere with an Internet connection become a reality.

Thus far only small players like mSpot and LaLa (purchased and closed down by Apple in 2010) have addressed cloud-based media solutions in this way. However, only the big players like Apple and Google (rumored to be launching its own music service with a cloud-based element soon) are likely to have the server capacity to make the idea a reliable, scaleable consumer proposition.

A more readable Web

In 2010, the success of the iPad forced publishers to reconsider the way they presented their content and Flipboard was a wakeup call to the idea of reformatting existing content in a more readable way. Expect technologies that allow Flipboard-style experiences on the Web to take a hold in 2011.

We recently covered Treesaver, a company that will soon offer a set of customizable templates that publishers can use to present their content with a highly readable magazine-style app. It appears Flipboard is heading for the browser too. Will it be a fad or a revolution? Time will tell but expect to see a number of experiments in this field this year.

Shakeout in the e-book market

As 2010 drew to a close, the battle for the e-book market notched up a gear with the launch of the Google eBookstore. Meanwhile, Amazon is aggressively advertising its Kindle ecosystem and Barnes & Noble’s latest Nook device has just arrived. That’s not to mention the other players out there like Sony. It’s likely we’ll see some shakeout in 2011, with less successful players pulling out or adjust their strategies significantly.

One thing’s for sure, a wide range of competing formats isn’t good for consumers and the public will most likely opt for the easiest, best supported service. A possible outcome is that some of the less successful players will adopt a more successful rival’s format. Third-party Kindle devices, anyone? With the right economic incentives from Amazon, it could be a win for all concerned.

Online 3D video goes mainstream

3D video on the Web is nothing new; YouTube has hosted 3D videos for some time. However, as Internet-connected 3D TVs start to become affordable and make the idea of watching three-dimensional content more popular, expect to see the concept become more popular online too.

It’s certainly likely that we’ll see big media outlets start pumping out a lot more 3D video but if handheld 3D video cameras can be made popular at a cheap enough pricepoint we could well see an explosion of user-generated three-dimensional content too. By the end of the year, a pair of 3D glasses could be a useful accessory when watching online video.

Beyond that, how about an iPhone 3D? Nintendo’s forthcoming 3DS handheld shows that portable 3D gaming is viable – who will be the first to bring it to the mobile world?

The “Post-blog” Blog

Far from the scrappy upstart competitors to major news outlets that they used to be, blogs are now an important news source that often breaking stories well before traditional outlets. As they mature, expect websites that started as blogs to transform into something different.

Gawker Media head honcho Nick Denton recently wrote an explanation of how his network was “Moving beyond the blog” with a new layout that ditched the decade-old “reverse chronological list of posts” blog format to a more magazine-like template that highlights the biggest stories of the day.

Elsewhere, Mashable has entered into content deals that see some of its stories published in print media as it expands its business beyond the online realm. In 2011, we’ll most likely see more deals of this kind as smart, nimble blogs capitalize on their content production strengths in new ways.