Wikimedia Commons Hits Two Million Mark

Hooray for the commons:

Wikimedia Commons, the multilingual free-content media repository managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, reached the milestone of two million uploaded files on October 9, 2007, less than a year after it reached one million. This makes Wikimedia Commons the fastest growing large Wikimedia project. The rapid growth reflects the young age of the project, launched just over three years ago in September 2004. Since March 2007, Wikimedia Commons has routinely had over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is now not uncommon for over 5,000 files to be uploaded in a single day. The largest single-day figure so far has been the 9th of September 2007, when a huge 9719 files were uploaded in a mere 24 hours.

(Via DigitalKoans.)

Print Has Heard the Music of Time

look at the difference in how each industry has reacted. The music industry continued to try and sue everyone it can in order to enforce a status quo that no longer exists. The news industry has perhaps resigned itself to the fact that they will have to operate with less revenues for the foreseeable future. But they are at least slowly coming to grips with that future and are still struggling to find sensible solutions. Imagine the cultural impact if media corporations started suing Internet users for reading news off of "unauthorized" websites.

For music, the writing is on the wall.

The Double Bind of the Commons

User-generated content is cool, so big media wants to co-opt it; user-generated content cares little for copyright laws, so big media wants to crush it. So what's a poor multinational to do? That's the thought at the heart of this nice piece from OnTheCommons.org.

The Future of Media

The Future of Media Report has two main things going for it. First, it comes from an Australian group, which gives it a slightly different perspective on things. Secondly, it is packed full of interesting graphs and charts. Make that three: it's available under a liberal CC licence.

Unrelenting Evil

I couldn't have put it better myself.