Creative Commons
A week or so ago, Ping told me about this Creative Commons launch party that would be taking place. I hadn't heard of it, but it sounded neat enough.
Everything concerning the licenses was very polished; the number and kinds of supporters they've already gained is impressive, although it makes sense that they wouldn't want to stick their necks out before gaining support. I certainly hope that they catch on for artistic works much like GPL and open licenses already have for software.
The choice of RDF for the "machine-readable" format of the licenses is politically rather interesting...
I did *not* expect this random event to be a weird meeting point between people I know from Ping and Berkeley, RDF weenies I got to know while I was in France, and even the Santa Cruz geek (!) scene.
I also got to bind my own copy of Alice in Wonderland courtesy of the Bookmobile, and a CD from DJ Spooky (who actually gave a very cool introductory talk before his performance, discussing, among other things, Max/MSP and HTML as this dialog between servers and links, which Hunter later criticised me for giggling at), and we saw a very good theramin player. Larry Lessig sounded like a slam poet when giving his speech.