Finding Open Media with MozCC
January 26, 2008 – 4:52 am by Thomas GideonOne of the challenges of enjoying and supporting open media is discovering it in the first place. One of Mur’s main goals for this site is to spotlight some of the best of what is out there. There is far more open media, though, than one person, or even a dedicated team, can find and review. Besides, your tastes may vary considerably from ours.
One tool you can use to help find open media is a wonderful Firefox extension, MozCC. Since its inception, Creative Commons has published machine readable versions of their licenses for creators to embedded in their web sites to help automated discovery of their work. MozCC takes advantage of this metadata and shows icons in Firefox’s status bar indicating whether the page you are viewing points to CC licensed material and what the CC conditions are.
So install the extension and see what you have been missing. And for creators out there, do not forget to include either the full metadata provided by CC if you can or at least use the links the CC license generator provides. (MozCC is smart enough to spot just the link if that is all you are able to include, as is the case with many hosting providers.) Oh and if you have questions about make sure your license is correctly visible to MozCC, don’t hesitate to drop me a note.
The easier it is for audiences to find open media, the more both they and the creators benefit.
8 Responses to “Finding Open Media with MozCC”
So I went ahead and downloaded and added this add on to firefox. Shortly there after though it began having problems. I would go to Livejournal and read my friends list there. The browser would lock up and give me the option to continue or stop running the script. The whole browser would stay locked up till I stopped running the script. I have uninstalled the add on and the problem went away.
By Jeremiah McCoy on Jan 26, 2008
What version of Firefox, of MozCC and on which operating system? I have run the most recent builds of MozCC 2 under Firefox 2 on a Mac with few issues. I will install it on my Linux work system and under my VM and see if I can replicate your issues.
A few builds back, I did notice some slowness but nothing like it with 2.4.3. You should feel free to report your concerns to the cc-devel list or if you share the pertinent details with me, I would be happy to do so.
I stand by my suggestion, that it is important to expose open media as such as clearly and prominently as possible and regardless of issues with MozCC itself, using the CC metadata as intended is one of the better ways to do so, at least for CC licensed material.
By Thomas on Jan 26, 2008
Oh, just noticed that the link for reporting a bug, like the script timeouts you encountered, Jeremiah, is here:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Report_MozCC_Bug
By Thomas on Jan 26, 2008
So .. I’m trying to get my license in order so my blog (wordpress engine) shows up correctly tagged… (and I notice that the single post template here is missing the id, too) … what’s the scoop? do i need a plug in? is there some kinda boilerplate in need to put in the footers or sumpin’?
TYIA
By Nate Lowell on Jan 26, 2008
Ok. Never mind.
I added a CC badge to my sidebar and viola!
http://creativecommons.org/license/
Thanks for pointing out a cool tool.
By Nate Lowell on Jan 26, 2008
One more follow up.
I noticed the difference between my blog and my flickr images. The mozCC plugin showed the actual licence criteria on Flickr but not on my blog.
To get the full display I needed to add some RDF tags to the page for mozCC to identify.
http://durandus.org/golden
Thanks, cmdln
By Nate Lowell on Jan 26, 2008
The full RDF is preferable, clearly, and the CC license selector will emit that RDF, as well as the badge and link snippet. I use the free hosting at WordPress.com for my site and they, rightly, scrape posts and take out all but the simplest tags. The fact that MozCC sees just the link, too, is nice and while it doesn’t parse the link for the license terms, you can always click on that link to get at the human readable and lawyer readable readable versions, anyway.
I should probably contact Automatic and see if they can give users of their free service an option to preserve the CC license RDF. Can’t hurt for asking.
By Thomas on Jan 26, 2008
I agree it is a great idea but my experience was suboptimal.
I am running XP media center edition and my firefox is 2.0 with all updates so I am not sure what was causing the problem. I did submit the bug using the bugzilla link you provided(thanks for that) and hopefully they will figure out what happened there.
By Jeremiah McCoy on Jan 27, 2008