Lisensa
So a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a startup from my former business partner Travis called neighboroo. There must be something in the air, because here’s another startup from another former business partner, Rudy Rouhana called Lisensa.
Rudy, Craig and I had a little company called WebTaggers back in the Bubble Days. You can read about that deal starting here and ending here. If nothing else, it’s nice to have the experience bookended by two New York Times articles.
Back to the subject of this post, Rudy’s new deal got some attention yesterday in a TechCrunch post. Michael Arrington seems to think it’s very similar to BlogBurst. Of course, that should be taken with a grain of salt because according to him, he is “an unpaid advisor to BlogBurst, and [has] done paid consulting work for Pluck in the past.“
(my own disclaimer: I work directly for Pluck, but in no way represent them here.)
Something in the Lisensa FAQ caught my eye:
Can I license more than just a blog with Lisensa?
We hope so! However, we have to walk before we can run. So, right now we’re releasing our service to license blogs and RSS/Atom feeds. After we’re successful in making this product useful and robust we’ll be launching new services aimed at other forms of digital content.
I think with the growing popularity of video content (and all the copyright issues that have come with it) would make this a huge differentiator for Lisensa. Same with audio for that matter. Creative Commons metadata is relatively straightforward to get out of an Atom or RSS feed since it’s embedded in the feed data, but video formats are a little trickier. In fact, CC recommends you embed the lisence into the page that hosts the video rather than inside the video itself. That doesn’t help you if the video gets posted somewhere else but I guess it’s a start.
Anyways it’s great to see Lisensa up and running. Kudos, Rudy!