Inside PBS Blog

Two political encores of interest this week, both released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License that allows users to share and remix content, giving attribution and sharing the newly remixed work with the same license:

Debra Jean Dean, having previously released her reading of the U.S. Constitution, has just uploaded an mp3 reading of the Declaration of Independence. The site asks that users "please e-mail us links if you remix, so we can enjoy them too."

And Jason Griffey follows up last year's State of the Union tag cloud with one for 2008 from Monday night. "Congress is mentioned a lot more this year, while health and oil donâ€â„¢t show up at all," Griffey comments. "This yearâ€â„¢s address looks more activeâ€Â¦instead of 'fight' we get 'fighting'. Overall, the themes are still easily picked out: 'terrorists' still play a major part in the speech, and we get 'empower' and 'hope' and 'trust' as themes."

To make the cloud, Griffey used TagCrowd, a free application by Daniel Steinbock that creates visualizations of word frequencies in a given text or url. TagCrowd is also distributed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license, which allows the above cloud image of last night's Clinton/Obama debate (generated from California Progress Report's transcript) to be posted on this blog.

How else might this content be remixed and repurposed? Are there new ways to incorporate tag clouds as lightweight tools for research or sharing?