Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

I was interviewed in the The New York Times about Al Jazeera, our coverage of Gaza and new media. Noam Cohen who authored the article happened to lunch with Larry Lessig on Thursday before we did the interview and consequently scooped the news on our soon to be launched Creative Commons project

For example, Mohamed Nanabhay, the 29-year-old executive who established Al Jazeera’s new-media group, beginning in late 2006, said that Al Jazeera planned to announce this week that all its video material of the war in Gaza would become available under the most lenient Creative Commons license, which basically means it can be used by anyone — rival broadcaster, documentary maker or individual blogger, for example — as long as Al Jazeera is credited.

More soon....

A slightly longer piece also ran in the International Herald Tribune.

Having just recently read America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy where David Ignatius moderates a discussion with former US National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, I was excited when I received an e-mail to an interview with Brzezinski on the current war on Gaza.

As strange as it sounds to be excited about foreign policy, Zbig is a brilliant strategist and has a very deep understanding of the problems in the region. If you can't get yourself excited about watching a wise old man for 10 minutes, you can probably work it up (as Jason Linkins at HuffPo suggests) just to watch what happens after Zbig tells the host "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

Now go get the book.

I took this picture at Qatar's man-made island, The Pearl. It's a massive multi-billion dollar project that involved dredging sand from the ocean to create this artificial Venice. I couldn't help but wonder if this couple was pondering what all this rapid development would mean for their country, their future and their children.

via Joi Ito via Creative Commons Website

We were fortunate to have renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan (director of the Emmy Award-winning "Yes We Can" video) offer to create a short film explaining the ideas behind Creative Commons. He interviewed CC board members Hal Abelson, James Boyle, Joi Ito, Michael Carroll, Lawrence Lessig, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Eric Saltzman, Jimmy Wales, and Laurie Racine and used the results as the basis for this terrific piece, entitled A Shared - Culture.

Download

A Shared Culture is available in several formats:

• Quicktime (web)
• Ogg Theora (HD)
• Original (755mb .torrent)

License

Creative Commons License

A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

See the page on the Creative Commons website for a wonderful list of all of the attributions for the works used to make this video.