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]

Space Invaders

SE Spam Mystery

Well, I was following up to see why I got a site referral on the query "the abrahms that do infomercials" (now I'll do really well on that query, although I still don't know who that might be, and obviously a search engine is auto-correcting my name), when I saw that the results were filled with odd Chinese pages filled with words and no content.

I thought it might be search engine spamming, but I don't understand how - because there are no links from the page. Nor even a title tag. So there's no way that PageRank can be gained or distributed, that I can see. It's puzzling me.

Startups in Boston?

Scott Kirsner writes in the Globe today about how Boston can't keep companies like Facebook from heading to Silicon Valley, with an argument that basically says that local VC's aren't daring enough to fund them (with an added measure that Silicon Valley is attractive in and of itself.

It was interesting to read this article in tandem with today's NYTBR article on how Alfred A. Knopf rejected many famous books over the years. If renowned editors trying to evaluate something relatively cut-and-dried like the quality of a history book are often wrong, it's not surprising that VC's are often wrong on something as tenuous as evaluating a brand-new Web 2.0 company.

The difference between Boston and the Valley may be simply the depth of the bench. In the publishing world, "The Diary of Anne Frank" could be shopped around to 15 publishers before one took the risk. In the Valley VC world, that could happen to. In Boston, you'd run out of options before then.

Passover

In the course of making a few revisions to our family Haggadah, I came across Bangitout.com's Seder Sidekick, an odd mix of midrash and passover parody lyrics. But more importantly, this site led me to a great 20th century innovation: selling chametz on eBay. Unfortunately for 123boaz, no one bought the bread. Perhaps if he wasn't actually going to ship his bread from Israel (at a cost of $16), he might have had some takers.