Category: Art

Book Crossing

A personal friend and overall great thinker once recited that books tended to reveal themselves to people at the right time and place. Some might say coincidence, I say fortune. Book Crossing attempt to engineer that experience by seeding the luck market.

The idea is simple. Register your book online and recieve a free BC-ID (Book Crossing IDentification) and release your book into the wild. This could be your favorite coffee shop, under a tree or any place of significance. Random people discover your book, read about book crossings, re-register the book online and begin reading. Users can track the books they release and monitor the progress. Alternatively, you can “hunt” for books in your local area.

Since consumers are the best critics, book crossings are an excelent way to discover books that impacted other peoples lives. I quote from the Ray Anderson the founder of Interface who attributes his companies environmental paradigm to a chance reading of the Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken.

Belgian Orchestra for Sale on E-Bay


When the Belgian Chamber Orchestra discovered they would not be recieving their government grant for 2007 they did what any organization would do. Yip! They put themselves up for bid on E-Bay! Suprisingly in just one week the bid rose from 1 euro to 8000! The group usually works with a budget of just over one million euros, so they still have a ways to go. But hopefully someone with a love of Beethoven and a few million euros will get up on E-Bay and save the day for the innovative musicians, who are not going out without exploring every option they can. Someone also put the Flemish Ministry of Culture and a list of all it’s members on E-Bay. It’s gotten no bids.

LegalTorrents.com – Free Culture

LegalTorrents is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed, legally downloadable, freely distributable creator-approved files, from electronic/indie music to movies and books, which have been made available via BitTorrent.

The legaltorrents.com site is also hosting a ‘guaranteed’ high speed seed for them. Everyone that grabs the BitTorrent client and downloads helps contribute more bandwidth, because BitTorrent utilizes your unused upload bandwidth. All of the current torrents are made available under a Creative Commons license with the full permission of the rights holder.

They also have an RSS feed.

Operation Photo Rescue

Operation Photo Rescue is a group of people who are helping those who had their photos damaged in natural disasters recover their pictures. They are looking for people with Photoshop and image restoration skills. A very easy way to make someone’s day better and help keep history recorded visually.

OPR has a blog:
“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, photojournalist Becky Sell and photo editor Dave Ellis have embarked on a mission to recover the photos and memories that would be lost to the storm.”