Obama Puts Website Under Creative Commons License and Officially Implodes Baby Boomer Power

We already knew that President elect Barack Obama has a Blackberry addiction and is totally savvy with social networking. But now the guy has placed his presidential transition website – Change.gov – under a Creative Commons license. A CC license allows users to republish any of the content on the site without fear of copyright. More importantly, CC licenses are part of a movement by cool, web democratic, information sharing millenials to open up content and stop being so anal about the whole idea of citizen journalism/blogging/remix.

This is exactly the sort of thing a baby boomer would NEVER bother to do – they’d struggle to find time in between listening to the White Album on LP, meditating, and skimming Ayn Rand (or another of their failed prophets).

That this guy, or this guy’s guys, actually gave enough of a shit about the Internet and the way young people communicate and socialise online, to be bothered doing this at all, is the most fundamentally uplifitng thing I’ve heard this week. And it’s not even the first time Obama has done this. In 2007 he wrote a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential Debates to be placed under a CC licence. And during the 2008 election he put CC licensed pics of himself and his family on Flickr.

There is now officially no way Obama can live up to the expectations I have for him.

Posted by Becky North in Creative Economy | December 2, 2008 11:15AM |