Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting a Creative Commons Salon here at the TOPP office.

CC Salons are bi-monthly events that bring together fans of free culture and open source.  The format is 3 short presentations, followed by beer (sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery) and pizza -- a can't miss combination. Last night's presenters were the folks from Wikia Search, the hilarious comedian Max Silvestri (of Gabe + Max’s Internet Thing), and the Livable Streets crew from TOPP.

If you haven't tried it yet, Wikia Search is a new community-driven search engine that adds the "human touch" back into search.  Wikia was founded in 2004 by Jimbo Wales, the creator of Wikipedia (who was in attendance last night -- what a thrill!).  Not only do they intend to improve the quality of search results through the power of their users, the entire project is open source, including the indexes of the internet that they constantly crawl.  I must say, it's a pretty cool idea, and I've already set it as my default Firefox search helper.

Max Silvestri is a piece of work -- a comedian who, according to his website is "great at a bunch of stuff, but especially eating," he gave a gripping monologue about the social pitfalls of Facebook and confessed that he stays up late remixing other people's videos.

Lastly, we gave a short talk about the Livable Streets Network and how we've used Creative Commons licensing for our content, specifically for Streetfilms. By empowering viewers everywhere to freely copy and share videos like Ciclovia, permissive licensing makes it easier to convince your local officials to support Livable Streets projects.

We've been using Creative Commons licenses all along, but we haven't really established a coherent strategy for licensing all our various types of content.  Lucky for us, Fred Benenson from CC (who organized last night's event) came back today and helped us think through our options.  Thanks Fred!  Keep an eye out for more CC badges popping up across the TOPPosphere.

Update: Fred from CC blogged the event on the CC blog, and posted a photoset from the event.