During the opening keynote at the JavaOne conference this morning, Neil Young made an appearance to demo his new project: an archive of the legendary rock star's work from the early 60s through the 70s that's now available on blue-ray. The archived content is free, and it's the first of several volumes that will be available to the masses.
I met with Neil Young for a press briefing after the keynote demo to hear a bit more about this archive project and learned that a driving force behind Young's desire to complete this project is a return to the quality that music lost during the 80s and 90s, thanks to the CD. Now that we have Blu-ray (which is rather reliant on Java technology), Young has finally been able to accomplish the interactive display of his content that he's been planning in his head for over a decade.
The archive itself is a multimedia display of Young's content that he's collected over the years, spanning music, news articles from various publications, photos from Young's personal library and even music that's never been released to the public.
From YouTube to torrents to social network sharing mechanisms, the culture for sharing content free amongst peers is an established aspect of Internet behavior. So while Young isn't necessarily promoting the act of sharing his content across your various means, I think it's an expected byproduct of eased communication tools.
The archives project will be featuring automatic updates, so you don't have to worry about missing out on any updated content. nevertheless, I'd still be interested in seeing a dedicated follow-up project that offers the content to be used in individual projects, perhaps even through services like Kaltura.