Mahalo Is Breaking Creative Commons And Their Own Rules

Filed Under News | 2010-01-22, 14:32

You would think that a site as “large” as Mahalo would be respectful of Creative Commons, as well as the quality of the information they are providing. Mahalo bills itself as “a human-powered search engine and a knowledge sharing service…” but it turns out they’re using algorithms to provide some of this knowledge. Algorithms that get it embarrassingly wrong sometimes.

There was a math teacher by the name of Heather Kennedy that was found guilty of sleeping with one of her 16 year old students. Mahalo has a page on her. On that page Mahalo is crawling Flickr and Google for related images. Great, automating information retrieval is useful in some case. However, presenting it on a page where it’s intended to be informational without specifying that this is simply a search for images based on keywords is bad form. Especially when Mahalo bills itself as “human-powered” and hand picked information. Either Heather Kennedy has had facial reconstructive surgery multiple times or Mahalo is automatically searching for images using the keywords “Heather Kennedy” and Creative Commons.

Only Mahalo apparently doesn’t understand Creative Commons, even thought their own content is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Most people classify their images as Creative Commons with Attribution, which requires anyone using the photos to “attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor”. In addition, many people specify that their images can’t be used for commercial purposes. Mahalo links to the image, but doesn’t give proper attribution, and it could very easily argued that Mahalo is for commercial purposes with the half a dozen ads on the page.

But what really gets me personally is the fact that Mahalo was using an image my friend, Rubin Starset, posted on Flickr that contains several friends (one with the last name “Kennedy”) and my fiance, Heather. It was the headline image with no links to the source or attribution. It’s obvious why this would come up in a search for “Heather Kennedy”, but it’s absolutely not related and was not attributed.

After contacting Mahalo, it appears they’ve pulled it as well as all images on the Heather Kennedy page, but if you look at any other pages you’ll see the very same method of retrieving images in use.

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DDI at How To Destroy The Universe Part 6

Filed Under Events, Fire, Fire Art, News, SF Bay Area, Video | 2009-04-27, 17:25

Dance Dance Immolation - Inches from fire

On Saturday, we pulled Dance Dance Immolation out of storage for the first time in almost two years, dusted it off and got it running again. The event was “How To Destroy the Universe Part 6″, an industrial party held at the new NIMBY location in Oakland. We ran one of the longest and most problem-free runs in the history of DDI. BoingBoingTV came and filmed and we had a chance to shoot the infamous sfslim with fire. We also got to shoot fire at several Noisebridge members, the newest blogger for Laughing Squid (Burstein), and a bunch of others. Many photos and videos were taken. My photos can be found in this Flickr set and this album on Vimeo.

If you’ve never seen Dance Dance Immolation, here’s what it looks like in action:

One of my personal favorite photos of the night was captured by Audrey while I was practicing my Fire Art DJ skills:

More photos and videos:

Purple Tunnel of Doom – The Google Map

Filed Under News, Personal | 2009-01-28, 20:08

I didn’t think I’d be posting more about the Inauguration, but the stories about the Purple ticket line and the infamous “Purple Tunnel of Doom” are gaining steam. The Huffington Post has a great round-up of info on it and I figured I’d share the Google map that I put together after the Inauguration because I wanted to see where exactly we were all day. Little did we know that we were actually under the Mall most of the day. Here’s a link to the map with photos and all.

And here’s a list of my Twitters from the Inauguration: http://tinyurl.com/edrabbitinaug09

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Our Inauguration Experience in Photos

Filed Under News, Personal | 2009-01-27, 19:37

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write up a blog post about our Inauguration experience (the good and bad), but I haven’t gotten anywhere close to finishing it. It’s rapidly approaching that point of no return where I know I won’t actually get it done, so I figured I’d post some photos for people that were interested in hearing about it. This is just a sampling of the photos I took. You can see the full sets on Flickr:
20090120-Barack Obama’s Inauguration
Out and About around D.C.
There are also some videos I streamed from D.C. here and some others here.

We woke up at 5am and were on the streets walking to the Capitol by 6am.

All the roads around The Mall were closed to vehicles so people were walking everywhere.

Heather yawns as we wait in line for 4+ hours in the infamous Purple Tunnel of Doom.

Things got pretty crowded.

We could see light at the correct end of the tunnel after about 3 hours. We started the morning in view of the light from the other end of the tunnel.

Last two people to make it through the police barricade as the crowd/mob surged towards the gate. I would have been the last one to quickly squeeze past the cops and barriers, but Heather got pulled through since we had locked arms to avoid being separated in the crowd. A quick (almost scarily unthorough) security pat down and we sprinted to get a view of the swearing in that would happen minutes later.

This is the Purple Gate you may have heard something about in the news.

Seen on the sidewalk. It probably would not have done them any good as thousands of people with tickets didn’t even get in.

We scored a spot right at the fence for the first block of Obama’s motorcade that would later join up with the entire parade. It was a long cold wait, but we got a chance to wave at the new President as he rolled by.

Secret Service is Serious Stuff.

Heather reacts to seeing Obama. She’s such a fan-girl. :)

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Streaming Qik from the Inauguration

Filed Under News, Video | 2009-01-20, 17:03

I was surprisingly able to stream a couple of Qik videos while waiting in line for and during the Inauguration of Barack Obama. I’m amazed that the cell networks held up, let alone allowed me to stream video. Here they are:
Walking down the loooong line for the Purple ticket holders:

Still waiting in line:

Catching part of Obama’s speech:

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Tickets for the Swearing In Ceremony of Barack Obama

Filed Under News, Personal | 2009-01-15, 16:59

Just got back from picking up our tickets from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s office. So excited to actually have them in my hands. Only 5 more days!

We’ve got seats in the North Standing (or Purple) area. If we get there early enough we might actually get a decent spot in the center! Here’s a map of the Inauguration “seating” for the different tickets:

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We’re Headed to the Inauguration!

Filed Under News, Personal | 2009-01-14, 20:05

image via Flickr

Jan 20th is my birthday and I can’t think of any better present this year than having Barack Obama as President.

I’ve never been much of a political person. I have my own views and opinions, but have never been interested in all the politics. A lot of that changed with this past election. Finally someone I felt could represent most of my interests and outlooks was running, and actually won. On November 4th, I watched Obama give his acceptance speech in a room of friends from all walks that I never thought would be as concerned as they were. Here was an entire generation energized by the potential the Obama represented to all of us.

Fifteen years ago I stood in the cold winter air of Washington D.C. on January 20th to watch Bill Clinton get sworn in. I had just turned 13 years old and did not really understand the significance of the moment. My highlight was having the group of people around us join in a chorus of “Happy Birthday”. However looking back on it, I realize that it meant something to my dad. I can’t speak for him, but I imagine he felt that there was someone taking office that represented him and his generation. It’s my turn for that. Coincidentally my dad will be there too!

So a few days after the election I decided that I wanted to be in D.C. again for another inauguration. We booked flight tickets (after a friend offered us floor space on which to crash) and I drafted an email to Nancy Pelosi requesting the free, but incredibly rare tickets. We had very little hope of actually getting tickets but looked forward to joining millions of people on the mall to experience this historic event. To my surprise a few weeks after I had sent in my request, I received an email from Nancy Pelosi letting me know that she would like to offer me tickets to the event. I was ecstatic.

So on Monday, Heather and I will hop on a flight to D.C. to join an estimated 4 million people for an unprecedented celebration. We’ll probably be spending the night on the floor in a friend’s office, 1 block from the Capitol, getting up early to get through the security checks and into place to wait for the official ceremony at noon and for history to take place. I will be twittering non-stop, and doing my best to take photos as I want to document for myself and I know others are interested in a more personal take on the event. If you’re going too, let me know!

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Quitting my day job

Filed Under News, Websites | 2008-08-15, 15:42

When I turned 25 it suddenly dawned on me that if I wanted to be successful and actually do something with my life I was solely responsible for making that happen. The next 3 years of my life saw me sitting down and building up a network of websites. It started as something I enjoyed doing in my free time, and over time it started to eat up more and more of my free time. It opened new doors and also provided some supplemental income. It allowed me to move to San Francisco. It let me buy new gadgets and toys. I longed for the day that I would be able to actually make a living off of all this work. I wanted to answer to nobody but myself. I wanted the excitement of actually creating something. That day has finally come.

Today is my last day at [large software company]. I’m walking away from a great team of people, a nice paycheck, a good working environment, and the security of health benefits, 401(k), vacation time, etc. I’m walking into the unknown of working for myself 100%. Life is good, life is exciting, and it is sure to be an adventure.

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Violet Blue and Boing Boing Debacle

Filed Under Geek, News, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Websites | 2008-07-02, 17:03

For those that don’t know, Violet Blue is a well-known sex educator and Boing Boing is one of the most(?) popular blogs on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Violet Blue’s posts getting pulled from BoingBoing, there’s more than enough press out there about it. Even the LA Times picked up the story. I don’t want to get into a long post about my thoughts on the matter, but I did want to share something I thought worth sharing.

I setup VioletBlueVioletBlue.net to house all of the Boing Boing posts that had been “unpublished”. These posts are all taken directly from archive.org where the old versions of the posts are kept. Boing Boing publishes their stuff under Creative Commons, so I am redistributing their work with attribution. I wanted this content to remain around and in a form that is easily locatable, i.e. not buried in archive.org’s wayback machine. If you have a blog post that previously linked to the post on Boing Boing, then feel free to link to its equivalent on VB2. These posts aren’t getting unpublished any time soon.

If I missed anything or made any mistakes on the site, please let me know. I make no claims to being perfect by any means.

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