When the Creative Commons project published its first licenses in December 2002, it finally brought a sense of unity behind the free content movement. Instead of many scattered licenses, creators now have the option to pick the right license for their work using a simple tool. They only have to answer basic questions like: "Allow commercial uses? Allow modifications?"

The tool then recommends one of the licenses developed by the Creative Commons team. They are legally sane, simple documents, specially adapted for various jurisdictions. In short, the Creative Commons project has made life a lot easier for everyone wanting to share content.

One particular licensing option, however, is a growing problem for the free content community. It is the allow non-commercial use only (-NC) option. The "non-commercial use only" variants of the Creative Commons licenses are non-free, and in some ways worse than traditional copyright law -- because it can be harder to move away from them once people have made the choice.

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You are probably all aware of the ever popular website MySpace.com, where teenagers, adults, and everyone inbetween goes to engage in incredible ego trips and incessant forays of commenting and message sending. If you've ever visited this angst-ridden, teenie-bopper haven, you'd be surprised to find that it can actually be mildly entertaining, given the right crowd. For the same reason, you wouldn't be at all surprised to find that its concept of security is an incredibly perforated one, given its very rugged and rudimentary feel, and its questionable URL schematics.

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Google is the new Internet behemoth, snatching up small companies left and right. So, in this article, I ask: what tech gems are in the running for Google's growing subsidiary menagerie? To help predict, I will first take a look at who Google has acquired in the past and what Google has done for them, and then I'll throw out a few possibilities for Googlification and discuss where they might fit into Google's strategy.

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Google AdSense tips and tricks that aren't what you expect.

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They say we're living in the Information Age. I think they're right - whoever "they" are. Before the Information Age, we had the Computer Age, and a long time before that was the Ice Age. Anyway, the term has really come into its own in the last couple of years, especially, I would say, with the advent of Google and with it, the requisite improvement in the retrieval of information. I am a Google fanboy, but this piece isn't about Google or any other singular entity because they are just small players in the part of a much larger game, though I do refer to them quite a lot.

Google didn't invent web search, but they re-invented it by extracting more relevant results for a given search query by re-examining the way relevance works. The result was that almost anyone could find information about almost anything so long as they had a computer and could access the Internet. The term "information age" was applied before it was entirely true. Since the term became common in the late 1970s, the world has slowly moved toward ubiquitous information permeation. Since then, the things that we have information on have multiplied. We now have information about information, often to several layers of abstraction so that a more useful picture can be seen.

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As a long time user and observer of the Internet I have gathered lots of experience with this new medium. This is intended as a guide to those who are new to the Internet and feel insecure about how they should behave when on it. It may also act as checklist for experienced users to see if there are skills they need to improve or if there are aspects of the Internet they may have missed.

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Many people are curious about the inner workings of Google, but they are mostly interested in keeping it a secret. So, any information we can glean comes from "black box" analysis. Recently, I wrote a short article that explains how I wrote some simple code that can instantly create PDFs of entire books from Google Print. Maybe some k5ers have more ideas on how to expand the concept, but, as you'll soon find out, I probably can't help in the efforts. Read on ...

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Many bloggers enjoy writing about their place of employment. This Internet rage is making a lot of employers upset, as bosses want their nice little drones to keep churning out products & services without all the pesky independent thought.

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Face it, online entertainment companies: massively-multiplayer games are not raking in the major bucks anymore . That's because players are bored; there just isn't anything new, fun, or interesting in the current crop of MMORPG's on the market today.

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iBill's purpose in business is to provide an easy-to-use, secure means of accepting online payments. Most web-fronted business are happy to let iBill skim a little off the top to avoid the hassle of handling payments themselves. Lately, they've been skimming it all.

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