You can now search for Creative Commons-licensed content using Yahoo! Search at search.yahoo.com/cc!

If you did not know already, Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work. Basically, if you made a creative work of art such as images/photography, audio/music, text/books or stories or blogs, video/movies, education/tutorials and you want to share it with the world, then choose a license type that you like and open it up for the world to admire. For example, you get to decide if you want to allow someone to make commercial use of it or if you want to allow someone to build upon the work by modifying or enhancing it, etc. My book is licensed under a Creative Commons license as well.

It is good to know that we are moving towards a more free-er and open world with open source software, open content, open knowledge and even open music. This is turning out to be an information age for the people, by the people and of the people.

One thing I like to see open up is Microsoft’s wallet. Ok, ok, I’m just kidding
And no, Google does not do CC search. In case you have forgotten, Yahoo! is pretty innovative as well. Almost forgot, the search api now supports CC-only search as well.

More information on the Yahoo! CC Search is in the Yahoo! Search blog, the Creative Commons blog and the Yahoo! Search API blog.

Update: With the Wikalong Firefox extension, you can have an open wiki-led way to surf the internet as well! Wow.

Lutz Horn, Bernd Hengelein and Christoph Zwerschke have volunteered and started to translate my Python beginner’s book to German! The project is hosted at developer.berlios.de/projects/abop-german.

If you know Python and German, you’re most certainly welcome to join the translation as well. You can start just one page at a time! Please contact Lutz Horn (lutzhorn at users.berlios.de) or myself (swaroop at byteofpython.info) for more details.

Thanks to Lutz, Bernd and Christoph for taking up this effort!

Its all over the blogosphere: 25,105,560 downloads in just 99 days!

Even Scoble’s congratulated the project: "In just a few months your app has become one of the most used Windows applications in the world. My hat’s off to you!"

Btw, I submitted this to OSNews as well

Juan Shen has translated my beginner’s book on Python ‘A Byte of Python’ to Simplified Chinese! Juan Shen is postgraduate at Wireless Telecommunication Graduate School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China PR.

You can read the Chinese version online right now. More details about Juan Shen and his efforts to spread Python in China is in a appendix in the translated version. Huge hug and thanks to Juan for taking up this effort

I got to know from the grapevine that Google has offered hosting for Wikimedia projects. See the discussion page for user views and add your own thoughts if you like.

In case, you already didn’t know, Wikipedia is a free excellent community-driven encyclopedia. It isn’t surprising that Wikipedia has replaced most of my searches. I recently wanted to know more about the saxophone, so I directly entered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone in my browser and read all about it. No search, no fuss. Maybe that’s why Google got interested in it…

As somebody pointed out in the discussion page:

Google undoubtly sees itself as the main – if not sole – dealer of information, in the forthcoming age of information trafficing. If this is the case (and only those who have seen the actual offer can say that), I’d say wikimedia should resist the offer.

Its great that Google has offerred hosting to Wikipedia and I don’t think I have a reason to be have any negative thoughts about it, but in a world of takeovers, I just hope they don’t have any other plans about it. This is a sincere wish of a Wikipedia user and contributor.

Sidenote : I am listening to SmoothJazz online radio, they play real good instrumental music.

The BangPypers group was created just 10 days ago. There has already been 202 messages by 44 members! Just goes to show that Python is alive and kicking in Bangalore. BangPypers rule! Uhh.. I mean they sing well

Yahoo! Japan now has blogs. More at SearchEngineJournal.

I have printed this ‘Choose Python’ poster (by Tim Lesher) and proudly posted it in my cubicle.

Oh, and as JD commented, I am brainwashing myself to say "Solutions matter. Don’t focus on anything else. Solutions matter."

P.S. My Python category feed was added to PlanetPython. Thanks Ryan! … this will be first post showing up on it, so a big hi from me to all you PlanetPythonistas

Ever since del.icio.us and Flickr have become popular, Thomas Vander Vaal invented the term ‘Folksonomy’ and ever since, the concept has taken off. There’s even a paper presentation about it.

So, when Technorati came up with tags, should we be surprised? However, the possibility is amazing. Suppose I wanted to read about the latest in the blogosphere about WordPress, then I just go through all the related blog entries under the tag ‘WordPress’ – this is really cool since you get to read a part description even before you go clicking on to read the actual posts. This is like the latest news about anything. Period. No wonder, there are talks about blogging being the new form of journalism!

Speaking of WordPress, there’s already a plugin for Technorati tags.

Totally unrelated but yet cool is this mini-posts plugin – damn, that’s yet another reason to upgrade to WordPress 1.5! (I know, I know, its still in beta…)

Update : David Sifry writes a detailed post on Technorati tags.

Today, I discovered the degree confluence project website and have been mesmerized ever since .

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree
intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories
will then be posted here.

There are nearly 40,000 photos from 159 countries!!

I especially like this photo taken at NW of Mohaka, S of Lake Waikaremoana, N. Island, New Zealand.