Creative Commons finally launched its licenses so people now have a range of choices other than the extremes of putting something in the public domain or asserting complete copyright control over something.
For example, people are regularly writing to ask me to use (sometimes even to quote) things that I have written. As long as they give me credit and it is for noncommercial use, I’m fine with that (in fact, I encourage it — take my content, please). Creative Commons will let me do that using a licensing framework that is a bit more formal.
I’m almost finished with a system so that I can designate which of the 9 Creative Commons licenses I want to apply to a given piece and have that reflected on the site. This is really both the strength and weakness of Conversant.
On the one hand, I don’t have to wait for Seth Dillingham or Macrobyte to create a Creative Commons interface. For this and a wide variety of other uses, I can whip one of my own up relatively quickly using a few macros and some metadata. On the other hand, this wide opened nature of Conversant seems to create a “okay, what do I do next” issue (especially since there are usually multiple ways to accomplish the same thing).