A Different Map of the Online Community World, Plus More on Creative Commons

Hi folks -- lots of stuff going on of interest in the online community world today.  First, check out this cartoon:

Map of online community done by cartoonist Randall Munroe at xkcd.com

It's a cartoon map of the online community world, done in the style of a map from antiquity ("Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons").

Be sure to click through to see the full-sized image; there are a lot of little outposts you might otherwise miss. And if you don't know what a community is (there are a bunch of niche ones), you're probably not a member of it.

(Of course, blogger John beat me to it.)

Two notes:

1. Naturally, AOL has a presence; the map is done in rough scale (see the note in the lower left), but I would be interested to see what data Mr. Munroe was pulling from, as "AOL" community covers everything from what we traditionally think of AOL community products (chat rooms, message boards, Journals), as well as other stuff, like the Weblogs, Inc. and other group blogs, Userplane Web community applications, and of course, everything that lives under AIM.

2. His cartoons are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. If you're not familiar, Creative Commons is a modification to copyright that gives content creators more flexiblity in how they allow other people to be able to reprint, remix, or otherwise use their stuff.

As they say on their Web site, "You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"

Since AOL is a commercial entity (not to mention a big target), my reproduction of the full cartoon might not pass the "noncommercial" test (different people have differing views on this depending on whether money actually changes hands, though we hew to a pretty conservative -- and restrictive -- interpretation); however, according to his terms of use page, you just have to ask him for permission (which I had previously done when I featured one of his cartoons over in my AIM Pages blog).

For other examples of Creative Commons in use, check out Ficlets, which is built on the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Entries in Progress -- Feedback Wanted
I have other entries on a user revolt at Digg, and an entry reacting to this Washington Post story from Monday, "Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers", which I will talk more about later today.

If you've blogged about any of these issues, leave me a comment or send me a link at my JournalsEditor@aol.com address and I'll take a look and see if I can work it into my entries.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: xkcd, randall munroe, online community, creative commons, ficlets, feedback wanted