I’ve mentioned it before, but I think that writing about it again would be worthwhile.

Blood, Sweat and Tea is (probably) the first book by a major European publisher to release a book under a Creative Commons license.  It has been released under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. which means that you can…

…use copyright material in specific ways without affecting the author's overall copyright in the work.

Under the terms of this book's licence, you are free to make copies of all or part of this work for your own personal use and for other non-commercial use. You may annotate or edit the work in any way, and republish it online in any format, providing any annotated and edited version includes a link back to the source material at http://www.fridaybooks.co.uk/bst

You may also make derivative works (Flash animations, videos, images etc, etc) based on this text for online, non-commercial use only.

Any annotated, edited or derivative version must be made available under the same Creative Commons licence as the original material.

As a wiser man than I has said, “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”.  It is also because this website is licensed under the same scheme and to change it now that a large amount of it is in a physical book seems like an unethical thing to do.  I love Creative Commons, it’s a great way of finding new music, writing and other art.  Sure – it’s a bit of a gamble, but I honestly believe that this brave step by my publishers is the best thing for this book.

I’ve got to admit that it was nerve-wracking in asking my publishers about this and I cannot commend them enough for listening to, and understanding, the thoughts behind Creative Commons.

So you can go to The Friday Project page and download the *whole* book in a variety of formats.  You can then fiddle around with it and do whatever you like to it then upload it back to The Friday Project just so long as you don’t try to sell it. 

Fun, yes?

I’m hoping, and it’s a bit of an ego thing here to be honest, that it might shake up publishing a bit in this country and provide a blast across the bows of those who would restrict what you can do with media that you ‘own’.

(You do realise that in the UK it is illegal to rip a CD to your iPod, even if it is for personal use?).

Lets see how things go…

'Girl With A One Track Mind' is an anonymous blog, concerning itself mainly with sex it has recently been turned into a book. The anonymous blogger behind it has since been 'outed' by the Press.

The 'Blogosphere' is built upon a number of things, reputation is one, conversation is another. It is also built on a form of respect, an 'honour amongst thieves' if you will.

I know 'Abby' in 'real life', she is a clever, funny and honest person. For quite some time she has been concerned that her real name would be found out. I know for sure that this outing is not a bid for more publicity.

She trusted in me to uphold the unspoken honour between bloggers. If I'd 'outed' her I would have increased the number of people reading my site, but I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror. It is these unspoken rules that help bind us bloggers together into the community that we have. For many of us it would not have even crossed our minds to reveal something about another blogger that wasn't in the public interest.

It appears that the Press have forgotten this honour. There is no 'public interest' in discovering the true identity of an anonymous blogger who happens to write about sex. Yet the Press seem to feel that it is their 'right' in order to sell more newspapers to the important female 18-30 demographic to invade someone's privacy in this manner.

The Press Complaints Commission's Code of Conduct states,

i) Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence. A publication will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent

I would be interested to see what reason the journalist who wrote this piece about her has to say about the justification of this intrusion.

We bloggers are not special, we have the same expectation of privacy as everyone else in the world, yet it seems that, at least for some journalists, we give up that right when we start writing. We bloggers examine every word on our blogs for their effect on our privacy, we edit what we write to reveal as much, or as little about our true selves as we desire. To start investigating those of us who want our privacy surely needs more of a reason than that of simple titillation.

So it seems ironic that when I am in a newspaper for all the right reasons, another is in the papers for no reason at all.

It is shameful and I hope that the journalist is disciplined for this breach of their code.

A police inspector brings us up to date on the forest Gate shooting.

I was reading The Independent today and one of the stories was about how single men in their thirties (i.e. me) are generally worse off than their happily partnered off colleagues. Then I saw that single people use 13% more energy and take up more space.

Finally there is the front page of Time Out.

I wonder if the government will soon start forcing us to have partnerships and I wonder if I should be 'regretful' about having not found the right person to share my flat/life/health concerns/power usage with.

Well if Blair and co. want me to partner up, then they better make shift work illegal.

A couple of days ago Ben Hammersley took some photos of me, for use in various publicity bits.

On the day we did this he had been fitted for his bulletproof vest. He's now over in Afghanistan both writing and publishing beautiful pictures.

Go take a look, he's a top bloke (and bloody clever as well). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he stays safe.