Those who’ve been reading my work prior to this website’s existence may have noticed my love for Creative Commons, and also my strong belief in and respect for the rights granted to creators through intellectual property law. If you created something, it’s yours, and you should be able to decide how it is used and distributed in the world.

You can decide to reserve all rights, create your own license (ouch), or use a Creative Commons license. Or you can go to the extreme end of the spectrum and just put your work into the public domain.

A Creative Commons license allows you to set the conditions under which others may use your work. I’ve released a large number of songs under Creative Commons licenses, and the response has been great - even resulting in a bunch of remixes. I believe the response has been much greater than it would’ve been had I reserved all rights, slapped a sticker on my work saying “Don’t Touch” and sat by with a shotgun in hand.

There is an age-old battle among designers and copywriters that argues whether the copy (content) of a page or the design of a page are more important. Members from each camp obviously argue in favor of their side.

I think this is a fairly simple debate to settle: it’s not about winning. It’s about the end product and how well it works. Content conveys a message; design decides how well the content is communicated. Both are symbiotic and in this relationship, one is not more important than the other.

That’s not writing. That’s typewriting.

- Truman Capote on novelist Jack Kerouac

This short quote is much older than the Internet, but it applies in every way to the quality of language used by so-called ‘independent online publishers’ every day. This poor use of language is contributing to the steady fall in expectations that society has of quality in the written word—these days, the 5th grade spelling and grammar of most blogs is considered acceptable.