My good friends Bryan and Stephanie Rieger have just launched a new type of media company called Yiibu. It's a new paradigm for developing and distributing content.

Their Big Idea in a Nutshell is:

1. Sharing content is good
2. Content shouldn't have a half life
3. There are alternatives to traditional copyright

The couple goes to great pains to help educate us on the real issues surrounding copyright. They have made a significant contribution to the present copyright discussion by providing a complete and highly informative copyright timeline. They also have a wonderful explanation (much better than the one on the Creative Commoons site IMO) on why we need flexible copyrights, which I have seen and read but they have yet to post.

Their first product Andaman - A Wee Guide to Tropical Fish is a wonderfully high quality product. What makes the product so amazing is not just its artistic quality or its educational merit, but that the content is actually reusable!

1. Multipurposing: play them on your, iPod, video iPod, PlayStation Portable, Series 60 Smartphone, Windows/Mac/Linux computers
2. Sharing: metadata has been embeded into the stacks, and the license is share alike.
3. Repurposing: they have basically provided the content source files as something they call "snippets", which will enable others to "re-mix and reuse them to make your own stuff".

Keep Yiibu on your map. I expect to see some great things happening from them...