Virtual week

Last week I was rather quiet for several reasons. On Wednesday I presented a paper entitled "Build Your Own World" at the beautiful Glasgow venue called The Lighthouse (available from the awesome Slideshare website). I was very impressed with the knowledgeable and diverse audience, but I am now a complete convert to Keynote's capabilities to deliver beautiful and useful presentations. This paper was part of a series of events organised by Urban Learning Space, a technology think-tank supported by Scottish Enterprise. I mostly talked about virtual worlds as the next stage in the user-generated content revolution, but I concentrated on some of the legal issues and potential problems that we will face.

After that I attended the screening of Bloodspell, the first Machinima feature-length film, which is also licensed under a CC licence. I should not sound too surprised, but I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the film. If you don't mind the polygonal characters, the story was very entertaining, and I found myself laughing at the right places. It was actually quite a funny film, and it served to reinstate my faith in the use of new technologies in order to empower creators to distribute their work to a wider audience. The question and answer session was very enjoyable, chaired by the always astute panGloss. The event was organised by London Metropolitan University (thanks again to Fernando), and by the amazing ORG, who just released their second year review.

Speaking of ORG, Jordan Hatcher has informed us that the report on the usage of Creative Commons by cultural heritage organisations is out now.