GlitchNYC

Continuing my round-up of the speakers at last night’s Video 2.0 meetup, Cruxy presented second, and were touted as the first ever official launch at a one of our events.

Cruxy allows people to upload any type of digital content and then offer it for sale. The guys up on stage were wonderfully anti-DRM and very hip to Creative Commons (literally wearing the t-shirt!). Even though this was the Video meetup, they were also quick to show that although you could sell your indie movie using their service, you could also sell PDFs, 3dsmax files, mp3s, and even group content items into “albums”.

Working to be completely straight with their content producers, they’re incredibly transparent about their fee structure. When you offer an item for sale, you enter your price, and they tell you how much goes to them, and how much goes to paypal right there on the page. My first thought was “CD baby, but for downloads”, and I’ve been waiting for years for this to show up! I’m glad to see if finally coming to fruition, especially from a bunch of guys who are independent themselves and really “get it.” I got a chance to talk with Nathan a bit afterwards, and they seemed much more excited about helping empower content creators than about making a buck.

They went on to show all the ways that they’re giving people to embed their sales engine, so that you don’t have to point people to your cruxy page, you can simply use your existing website, blog, or myspace page to generate sales. In the same way that you can embed youtube videos on your blog, you can drop in their sales widget and people can preview and buy your content right there using a credit card or paypal account. Bands can even use their tool to create an replacement music player for myspace that allows sales.

It looks extremely cool, and they’ve certainly got a clear revenue model. The final piece of their puzzle is that promoters (including podcasters, which made my ears perk up) will also be able to establish relationships with content creators and potentially get a cut of any sale through they system that they generate.

As for my opinion, well, let’s just say I’ll be recommending Cruxy to many of the bands we work with on The Alternative Music Show. If you’re an artist struggling with how to sell your content online, you owe it to yourself to check Cruxy out.

I release all of my photos (and just about anything I do, actually) under an open source license in the hopes that people will like what I’ve done and pick it up and use it elsewhere. I got a flickr message today letting me know that WNYC.org was using my picture of the Astoria pool. WNYC is running a story about NYC using pools and large airconditioned spaces as “Cooling Centers” during the heatwave, and decided my photo fit the bill.

I love that they used the photo, and I love that they sent me a note on flickr to let me know they used it. This is a media organization that gets it!

Housing inventory growth in Phoenix
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

Ever blow up a balloon, and then stretch the neck to hear it go “EEEEeeeeee”.

Yeah. This is the sound of the housing bubble deflating. It’s not quite as noticable as letting go of the balloon and having it fly around with a “Pbbbpbth!” but it’s damn annoying, and the balloon’s getting smaller, and it’s certainly not going to blow itself back up.

There was an interesting comment on the housing bubble blog listing “available inventory”, otherwise known as the number of houses currently for sale, in Phoenix. It listed the available inventory on a daily basis from 7/20/2006 to 5/9/2006 (up to the day it was posted!) Seeing numbers this concrete takes the guess work out of where the housing market is headed. The law of supply and demand says that as inventory goes up, prices come down. As you can see, inventory is on a very steep, consistent climb.

Phoenix is one of the “hot” markets of the housing bubble, but certainly isn’t the top of the list. Inventory run ups like this are being seen nationwide, and are leading to price reductions (if the seller is smart) and long waits to sell as bubble flippers all try to cash out at once.

They’re all looking for the bigger sucker right now.

Just a little bit of found art from the subway.

I was talking with my friend Toby today by the coffee machine, and she sounded very down as I made small talk. Everyone has bad days, and it’s a been a particularly gray week, but I was struck by the hilarity of the tone of our conversation and got a very vivid mental image.

The conversation is pretty much exact, as I remember it.

Maybe I need more sleep, but I think this is hillarious!

The Creative Commons is the group which makes artist and sharing friendly content licenses available for use free of charge. They do all the work of writing up the legalese and making sure the licenses benefit the artist and the public, leaving artists free to slap a CC license on their content and be clear about who can do what with it. For example, all the content that I’ve created here at GlitchNYC is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license.

What that means is that you’re free to use any CC-BY-SA content as you see fit (including commercially) as long as you give me attribution, and you release your work under the same license. There are other more and less restrictive licenses available at CreativeCommons.org, and the Creative Commons movement is truly helping artists make their work more available to anyone who wants to use it, without going through traditional big-media distribution channels like publishing houses and record labels. The clearly stated and easy to licenses also clear up many of the copyright complexities that face media creators today.

If a filmmaker is looking for a song for their nonprofit documentary, but has no budget to work with, where do they go? Today, thanks to the work of the Creative Commons teams, they can search for Creative Commons licensed songs on the web, and rest assured that they are free to use the song in their movie, providing they abide by the restrictions of that particular license, such as “non-commercial,” “Attribution,” and/or “ShareAlike.” The filmmaker might even be inspired to release their film under a Creative Commons license themselves, and keep the creative cycle flowing.

As noted on BoingBoing today the Creative Commons is asking for small donations from a large number of people to help them achieve nonprofit status in the eyes of the IRS. I’ve already made my contribution. If you like the work the Creative Commons is doing, contribute the small amount needed now to help them achieve their goal.