The future is here, it's just not widely indexed yet.

The future is here, it's just not widely indexed yet.

With apologies to William Gibson who originally said

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. [William Gibson]

The Creative Commons Search Engine is now up and running in Beta.

Thanks to Lawrence Lessig and the folks at the Creative Commons there is a chunk of information on the web now available under a Creative Commons License, and now it's indexed.

It's hard to explain how important this is.

Will this Nutch powered search site change the world? Yes. Because in a year or two CC Search will have set the example and all the major search engines will being able to index and search on CC License metadata.

That chunk of CC licensed content, just a kernel, was already growing. More CC licensed content is being added to the web every day, but the addition of a search engine is going to make that growth accelerate.

Think of it from a system persepective, which content has less friction, has less barriers to re-use, has more opportunities to be remixed into new content, new forms, new parts of our culture? Is it CC Licensed content that is clearly labeled and indexed or is it the jealously guarded content of the MPAA and RIAA? That chunk, that kernel, of CC licensed content is going to grow, and now it's going to grow faster than all the rest of the copyrighted material in the world. In the future we'll view bar charts that plot the kinds of content on the web, with large bars for Attribution, No Derivative, Share Alike, etc. At the end of the graphs will always be a small sliver, a little bar labelled "Other", that's the bucket where all the unlabelled content will go. That's the bucket where most of the content on the web today will go.