Toluu

Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

NIN's CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 AlbumJanuary 5

Very cool update on the CC licensed CD from Nine Inch Nails on the CC Blog.

Creative Commons Blog

NIN's CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Fred Benenson, January 5th, 2009

NIN's

Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there's the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work's strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard's Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year

Moving to DubaiJanuary 1

As of December 30, 2008, I am a legal resident of Dubai, UAE.

When Della Van Heyst invited me to a conference in Bahrain in 2007, I decided to go because I had never really been to the Middle East and realized that I needed to understand the region better if I one of my goals was to be a global citizen. The meeting was interesting and only reinforced my view that I was completely ignorant about the Middle East and Muslim culture. After Bahrain, Jay took me to Dubai where he was about to relocate to and introduced me to some people including his friend Balall.

My work at Creative Commons includes supporting the spread of Creative Commons globally. We have had success in Asia, Latin America, North America, Australia/New Zealand and Europe. While we have met some great people and are moving forward in the Middle East and Africa, these two regions continued to be difficult for us. Last year, we appointed Donatella Della Ratta as the Creative Commons person in the Middle East and Donatella along with my small (but increasing) number of Muslim friends have tried to coach me and navigate my understanding of the region.

However, I soon decided that trying to learn about the Muslim world remotely wasn't going to work. At the risk

Happy New YearDecember 31 2008

Photo by Joi Ito, Design by Matsuichi

While 2008 was a tough year for everyone, it was full of surprises and interesting connections. The most interesting connection was that Mizuka and I finally got married after living together for ten years. (See joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/12/03/we-got-married.html )

In 2008, I began to explore the Middle East and decided that complete immersion was the only way to do it right. This New Year's card is being sent from Dubai where I will be moving my residence and base from 2009.

I am really looking forward to an exciting and "changeful" 2009 with all of you and hope to continue my journey to find happiness for myself and you, my increasingly global community of friends.

Longer post about Dubai later...

$12k to go - Creative Commons updateDecember 29 2008

Happy Holidays -- I hope many of you are getting a chance to relax after an incredibly difficult year for most people. However, take heart, I'm writing with good news. We're now entering the last couple of days for the Creative Commons annual fundraising campaign just $12,000 short of our $500,000 goal. In such a harsh fundraising climate, we're coming very close to reaching our goal thanks to the generous support of our community -- we need your help in getting all the way there.

My work this year has been primarily focused participating in Creative Commons as its new CEO, which has had its challenges and its reasons for hope this year.

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization run mostly by volunteers all over the world. The board and the CEO role are volunteer jobs and in fact each board member is also a financial supporter. Even with the support of a network of volunteers, Creative Commons requires a small number of underpaid staff and some basic infrastructure to survive and continue its mission.

Creative Commons started as a primarily author and musician focused idea from the United States and has grown to a global 50 jurisdiction project in contact with 80 countries making impact in the sharing of scientific materials and data to helping teachers to share teaching material. We have forged alliances with rights collection societies and other organizations that have been, at times, c

Ping.fmDecember 22 2008

Reid and I recently invested in Ping.fm. It's a service that allows you to update all of your social networks at once and is one of the few services I use every day. I've been talking to the founders Sean and Adam who I really like and am happy to be joining their team to build a simple but useful service.