Grumpy about Ts and Cs

I decided, for once, to read the terms and conditions before I signed up for some sort of locational blogging site. And I was struck by the site's attempt to put a friendly face on the typical harsh terms imposed by lawyers. So a key section starts "What’s yours is yours. You own your User Content, not us." Wow, they really respect the IP in my blogging. But then...

You grant the Company and its affiliates a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display your User Content (in whole or in part) and/or to incorporate such your User Content in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.

So I own the content, but they can do anything they want with it, even in forms that haven't been invented yet. About the only concession that they grant to my ownership rights is that the license is non-exclusive. It says later that you can delete your profiles and that removes your content from the site, but they could still use it anywhere else, perpetually.

Oh well, enough ranting for now. I have to try it out.

Finding a bad lawyer

Good news on the work front: after weeks of waiting on this and waiting on that, my team finally got an updated version of Boston.com search out the door and into the wild today. It fixes dozens of little things that were bugging me. My favorite feature: we make it a lot easier now to set your default location for business searches. And we know about local locations that Google doesn't do well, like the North End. And we can help you find bad legal advice in Our Fair City from Dewey Cheetham and Howe.
[where: Harvard Square, Cambridge]

Romanesko - "News and information is the new rock 'n roll," says Abrams

It's not often that the subject line of an email makes you smile the way that one did for me. It's about the new "Innovation Officer" for the Tribune company. (Good innovation, like rock 'n roll, is rarely created by top-level executive hires).

Not that I'm related to Lee Abrams. Or Gen. Creighton Abrams (of the Abrams tank). Or weatherman Elliott Abrams. Or to Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, lately of the National Security Council (although he did once send me an email he thought was going to his sister).

Where is the Capitol Theater?

It's a popular movie theater in Arlington. But if you try to find it on Google, it's on Mass. Ave in Boston.

That's a big improvement over AOL Local (formerly CityGuide): it thinks the theater is "convenient to Rts. 2 and 16", but "6132.82 Miles Away" from Boston, in Kyrgyzstan not far from the Kazakhstan border (you have to zoom out the map to see, because they don't have detailed maps of the middle of nowhere).

The clear winner: Yahoo!. They've got it a few feet east of the location, but that's rounding error.
[where: 204 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA 02474]

Democratic Book Social Cataloging Straw Poll

While the political journalists focus on the money primary, endorsements (do any voters really care who my employer endorses, especially in the Republican primary?), and the Iowa Caucuses, I've decided to look at a totally trivial constituency: people who list their books on Librarything, one of my favorite websites.

The clear leader in literary popularity is Barack Obama, with 1142 libraries including the Audacity of Hope, and another 898 his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Hillary Rodham Clinton runs second, with 835 copies of Living History and only 188 copies of "It Takes a Village." Obama's work also gets a better rating - 3.93 average, against 3.35 for Clinton (out of a possible 5 stars).

The rest of the pack:

• John Edwards - 58 copies (but a very impressive 4.5 rating for "Four Trials")


• Dennis Kucinich - 25


• Christopher Dodd - 21


• Bill Richardson - 18


• Joe Biden - 7


• Mike Gravel - 6

Miscellaneous

• It's always humorous when your children reuse your idiosyncratic phrases. Joshua opened up a DVD from the library this evening and declared "This DVD has serious shmutz on it" and brought it to me to clean.


• This was something that made me laugh yesterday: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks


• While checking my del.icio.us bookmarks for that URL, I just saw a blog that I had saved for looking at some more: The Jew and the Carrot. Perhaps a bit more radical than my taste, but bringing three of my interests (Judaism, food, and social responsibility).