1. Choosing a creative commons license

I choose my creative commons license because it was the most flexible. I really don’t care if someone wants to use my work to make money or not. If they want to quote me, cool, just show some credit. In the end, it’s really not going to matter who used my work, but how they used it. I just think it’s pretty cool that anyone can trademark all their ideas now without really having to deal with a patent office or something like that. So if someone’s going to create a program or website that let’s me trademark my work and free of charge then why should I limit people on what they can use my work for. Do what you need to with it, take it how you want, but show me that you respect my work and I’m cool with that. I didn’t intend to really profit from these ideas except for my grade in the class so why not give them to the world? Honestly, that’s how I kind of feel about most writing though. It doesn’t really cost anything to jot down your thoughts, save for the price of a pen and piece of paper, and most of the time you can find those lying around anywhere. Why try and be the only one to use your ideas because if you choose to do that, not many people are really going to listen or respect them. Those are just my feelings on the matter though. So have at it guys, but just give a little bit of credit to the person who thought of the ideas and we’re cool.

2. Sustainibility + Economy

For the sustainability exercise, my first idea was to try out EBay. I thought it might be interesting to see what popped up so I typed “sustainability economy” but had zero matches. Then I decided to try Digg. For those that don’t know. Digg.com is a website that compiles websites of all different kinds together by different users and when people like it, they “digg it.” The more diggs you get, the higher your website gets on their website. More people find it based on what others like. After typing in my selection, zero websites were shown using both words. In fact none of them highlighted sustainability, only economy. The top website had 1875 diggs, the next highest was only 418, so I decided to use the first one. It was an article from the Huffington Post by Hale “Bondad” Stewart from March 12, 2008. It talked a lot about how Americans were spending all their money but the “powers that be” urged them to continue to sort of create a new and stronger market. The article was extremely left winged. He wasn’t exactly pointing the finger at the Bush Administration but you could sense the tone. He used a few graphs from the U.S. Department of Commerce. He had a couple more but he didn’t specify if they came from the same place or he got them somewhere else. Also, I would like to add that I just got done working eleven and a half hours so reading an article about the U.S. economy wasn’t really holding my attention. He used a lot of economic terms I hadn’t heard in awhile so I didn’t really follow along extremely well. If you would like to read the article I used here is the link.

Huffington Post Article

3.  Steamboat Mickey Exercise

    I listen to a lot of hip-hop and rap.  It’s my musical preference.  Whether it’s Eminem, Talib Kweli or 2pac, I span the whole genre.  I’ve read countless books and websites about hip-hop and have hundreds upon hundreds of albums that I’ve listened to and studied so I know a little about it.  To pick just one song from the genre isn’t really saying much because the entire genre is based around using other people’s music remixed by a DJ or producer and an MC rhyming over the newly mixed beat.  It all started in the 70’s in the Bronx or Brooklyn or whatever borough in New York wants to take credit, it doesn’t really matter.  The point is, is that it was just a few people sitting around a record player when one of them realized they could “scratch” the record by moving it back and forth and blending it with other music to create a whole new sound.  That’s why; in the beginning the DJ’s were more important than the artist such as in the case of RUN-DMC.  So much emphasis was put on what Jam Master Jay was doing during their earlier shows as opposed to the MC’s Run and DMC.  So hip-hop in itself is a good example of the “Steamboat Mickey” example.  If I could get a little more current, somebody most people in the class will know more about is Kanye West.  He produces a lot of records and most of them are just samples he sped up.  His first single “Through the Wire” samples an old Chaka Kahn song from 1985 called “Through the fire.”