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…

Lets see…

Monday

08:05 Picked up by cab from my house (probably in a state of unconsciousness).

10:00 Live interview with BBC Radio Derbyshire.

10:30 Live interview with BBC Radio Jersey.

11:00 Interview with The Weekly News.

12:00 Interview with Ambulance Today.

13:30 Interview with BBC Radio Wiltshire.

14:20 Interview with Simon Mayo on Radio 5 Live.

15:20 Visit Apple store in Regent Street for new goodies for my Macbook

 

Tuesday

10:00 Pickup for Interview with The Guardian.

18:30 Phone interview with REM FM Spanish Radio.

 

Wednesday

18:00 Back to serving the people of East London.

 

The Devil makes work for idle hands…

I should be doing an interview on Talksport radio later this evening.  Then tomorrow I start at around 8am do a load of regional radio programmes from a studio in London, then get interviewed by the Guardian and The Weekly News and finally have a drink and give some quotes to an Ambulance magazine.  Then on Tuesday I do a phone in with a Spanish radio station ad something else that I can’t remember but is written down on my Mac – which is in my bedroom and I’m quite comfortable sitting here.

All a bit busy, all a bit fun and I’m glad that Rachael from the PR firm has it all organised for me.

I mention this in one big burst because of something I’ve been thinking about from before my holiday – that this ‘ambulance blog’ has been a bit short on ambulance posts for quite a while.  I feel the need to get back to basics as it were.  The problem that I have is that if I’m not working (for example taking two weeks leave for a holiday in the sun and a book launch) then I’m not getting much material and the reserves of material that I’ve built up are close to running dry.

Luckily I’m back to work on Wednesday or Thursday (Mac in other room again) so there should be plenty of material.  If people discover this blog from the book/radio/TV they’d be a bit disappointed at the moment.  So I’m going to make an effort to post every day, I feel that, for someone who is supposedly a writer, I haven’t actually been *writing* enough.

Time for that to change.

UPDATE: I've just come from the Talksport studio having recorded my bit for between 02:00 and 06:00 tonight/tomorrow morning. It was good fun, the host was a superb interviewer and I think it's my best interview yet. If you are in the UK this wiki page tells you how to listen to it.