The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative specification (which Creative Commons is coordinating) has entered its final public commenting period. Please look if you're at all interested in education metadata and/or how efforts spurred by schema.org (which LRMI is) will shape up.

The W3C published drafts recently that ought be of great interest to the Creative Commons technology community: a family of documents regarding provenance and a guide to using microdata, microformats, and RDFa in HTML. I mentioned these on my personal blog here and here.

Speaking of things mentioned on my personal blog, a couple days ago I posted some analysis of how people are deploying CC related metadata based on a structured data extracted by the Web Data Commons project from a sample of the Common Crawl corpus. Earlier this month I posted a marginally technical explanation of using CSS text overlays to provide attribution and a brief historical overview of 'open hardware licensing', something which the CC technology team hasn't been involved in, but is vaguely labs-ish, and needs deep technical attention.

Other things needing deep technical attention: how CC addresses Digital Restrictions Management in version 4.0 of its licenses is being discussed. We don't know enough about the technical details of various restricted systems (see last sentence) that CC licensed works are being distributed on/to/with every day, and ought to. Another needs-technical-attention issue is 'functional content' for example in games and 3D printing. And we're still looking for a new CTO.

Finally, Jonathan Rees just posted on how to apply CC0 to an ontology. You should subscribe to Jonathan's blog as almost every post is of great interest if you've read this far.

Addendum: It seems remiss to not mention SOPA, so I'm adding it. Thanks to the technology community for rising up against this bad policy. CC promoted the campaign on its main website through banners and a number of blog posts. Don't forget that SOPA/PIPA may well rise again, the so-called Research Works Act is very different but is motivated by the same thinking, and ACTA threatens globally. Keep it up! In the long term, is not building a healthy commons (and thus technology needed to facilitate building a healthy commons) a big part of the solution? On that, see yet another post on my personal blog...