It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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Atlantic.com has just posted an article of mine that re-examines the “Argument from Architecture” that has been at the bottom of much of what I’ve written over the past twenty years. That argument says, roughly, that the Internet’s architecture embodies particular values that are inevitably transmitted to its users. (Yes, the article discusses what “inevitably” means in this context.) But has the Net been so paved by Facebook, apps, commercialism, etc., that we don’t experience that architecture any more?

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NPR has announced that it’s making 800,000 pieces of audio embeddable anywhere you want, including on this blog:

When you browse their site you’ll find an “embed” button to the right of a story’s “Play” button. Click ‘n’ paste. (And at the bottom of the widget that you embed you’ll see a tiny, gray copyright notice.)

Thank you, NPR.

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At the Italian Internet Governance Forum, I met Rick Falkvinge:

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One of the heroes of the Internet turns 50, and the people who love him (and there are a lot of us) thank him on this perfectly appropriate video:

Larry Lessig 50th Birthday Lip Sync Tribute from Daniel Jones on Vimeo.

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