Happy birthday, darling Ruairi.

Tucked up next to me in the big bed as I type as quietly as possible beside you, you're sleeping fitfully - fighting the vile flu that laid your Mommy and I low for the last few days. Poor mite.

Years from now, maybe you'll come across these words and recall how completely tickled you were at the whole idea of being five. It's been a major milestone for you, I guess. Always one of the youngest in your class, I suppose you've tended to measure yourself against some of your best friends - all of whom have been five "for ages". It's entirely natural. You were so adorable, marching off to school all bundled up in your snowsuit this morning, saying: "I can't wait to tell Sean I'm five!"

Telling Mommy and I tonight in the car on the way out to East Side Mario's (your choice - just so you could get to spin the birthday wheel) that you're "not a toddler any more, now I'm a kid!" You're so funny, my Ruairi. So full of chat and ideas and honest, generous thoughts. Don't be in such a hurry to grow up, lovely boy. Of course, we want you to grow big and strong - but we sometimes wish you could stay just as you are too.

It's late, Daddy's tired and still feeling sickly, otherwise I'd write more. But no amount of words could ever really say it all. We love you so much, little Ruairi. We always will. Happy birthday, Opus, and good night.

I'm troubled by something, and yet I'm not sure whether I really ought to be worried or not.

Hardly a day goes by without a handful of invitations to new social networking services landing in my inbox. The e-friend machine du jour seems to be this Spock thing. I'm getting 3-4 "requests for my trust" per day. And if it's not Spock, it's Trig, or ECademy, or MyRagan, or Quechup, or some other Ning-based abomination.

No offense to any eager YASNS developers out there, and I really do appreciate the invitation, but frankly, I'm just getting really tired of all these Web 2.oh communities that want to lay claim to all of the content contributed by their users.

The Spock Terms Of Service are a good example. They include a piece of irritating legal boilerplate that is popping up - in one form or another - all over the place:

"You hereby grant Spock (and each of its registered users, as limited by the "Personal Use Only" section, above) the royalty-free, unlimited, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable right and license to make, use, copy, distribute, display, publish, perform, modify, or translate any such Postings for any purpose and in any medium worldwide (including but not limited to incorporating the Postings into Spock databases or any other Spock property, product, or service) and to sublicense the foregoing rights, and this sublicense right, to others."

I'm sorry, but no.

I have no qualms about contributing pretty much anything I write to the commons. That's why this blog carries a Creative Commons license over there in the lefthand sidebar. But why would I want to grant all rights to these guys to do whatever they want with my stuff, potentially including making money out of it...?

I'm sorry if that isn't very big-S Social and collaborative and "spirit of giving" of me, but really.

There are already enough sites out there scraping my inane bletherings and running ads alongside them without me explicitly opting into yet another one. I can't imagine the deluded losers who lift my posts for their splogs are making much more than a tin sou from the practice, but what ever tiny amounts they are making, I'm sure as hell not seeing any of it. I don't even make any money out of the stuff I publish on my own server - and nor do I choose to (which is, I believe, the entire point).

But it's not about the money - it's about the content and it's about hierarchy of rights. I'd like to think it was as simple as:

1. What's mine is mine;
2. Anything mine that I say you can have is both yours and mine (where you = humanity in perpetuity).

...subject to certain conditions in some cases. Actually, I think that's pretty much what my existing Creative Commons license does say.

The catch is, when one joins one of these services, one is explicitly accepting their terms - terms which, in most cases, allow them to ignore whatever restrictions (or unrestrictions) you've put in place.

Of course, the problem is not limited to Spock. Facebook has pretty much the same rotten garbage in its ToS, as does LinkedIn.

Here's a use case: my Facebook profile includes a sort of mini-aggregator. At some point, before I stopped to think about these things, I plugged in a little FB app that reads my RSS feed and republishes my blog posts inside the Facewall (to use Doc's excellent phrase).

Outside the Facewall, those blog posts live a carefree, pastoral existence - roaming happily through the wilds of the Net, mostly unworried by issues of ownership. Once inside Facebook, however, they become potentially commercial objects - part of the giant content mill, churning away in the never-ending quest to build a better advertiser magnet.

Outside the Facewall, they're mine and freely distributed to the world at large, under simple CC licensing provisions.

Once inside, though - now who do they belong to?

Still me, I guess, but I've also unwittingly given the Facebookkeepers "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing".

That's my emphasis, of course - it's the "commercial, advertising, or otherwise" part that really grates.

In similar vein, I recall hearing Cory Doctorow complaining about the well-known Audible audio books service on a recent episode of the TWiT podcast. Cory won't allow Audible to distribute his excellent books in audio format because they insist on adding DRM to works he has already published under CC licenses. It's the same kind of hierarchy of rights issue, I think.

There are some notable exceptions in the Web 2.0 world. Google's Orkut, which I played around with for a while in 2004, still includes the gotcha text, but they were nice enough to throw a few clue-brackets around it:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

and:

9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.

That makes sense. They seem to be saying: "the law is all a bit fuzzy here, so you'd better grant us some rights to your stuff just so that we can host, publish and distribute it. But it's still definitely your stuff."

An even better example, from my simplistic, unschooled point of view, is in the Twitter ToS. OK, so Twitter's not what most people might call a "social network" - but there are certain similarities and it is, above all, primarily a vehicle for content. The relevant excerpt:

"We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours."

Yay!

So. Am I wrong to worry about all this stuff?

If I post something to my blog which is later syndicated on my Facebook profile page, does my pre-existing CC license trump their evil ToS? Or can they do whatever they want with my words without asking? If my information wants to be free, is it fair for someone else to capture it and lock it up?

This is hard stuff for me to figure out. I like the idea of social network services. We’re social animals by nature, so these online expressions of our flocking behaviour are interesting, welcome and, in several ways, useful.

But it's clear that the long-term success of any one of these services is predicated on having a certain critical mass of users, connections, and content. It's the combination of these three things that attracts the $$ - whether in direct funding or in ad revenue. So one way or another, they're all making money off me. If I don't contribute, they don't grow, and the things I do like about their services will die. But why do they have to be so greasy about it?

I think there's a key difference between the ToS of something like Twitter and the terms you might find at Spock, LinkedIn, or FB. The Twitter ToS sounds like it was directly shaped by the founders. It actually reads like something Ev might have written. The others sound like something lifted out of a corporate legal stockbook of ready-made precedents - pages where no human eye has ever set foot :-)

And therein lies the rub, I think. As Doc Searls wrote earlier today, in a different context: "The only real social networks are personal ones". True. Virtual social networks, at least in their Terms of Service, are just too impersonal.

Related posts:

How to lose Friendsters and Influence People
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New Chapters Indigo Online Community: Both a Hit and a Miss

Jeremiah Owyang stirred up something of a micro-blogging storm earlier today, starting with an excellent summary post about the growing use of Twitter as a rapid-fire means of connecting, communicating, meme-tracking, and generally following the daily thoughts, deeds and interests of friends and like-minded people throughout the noosphere.

(Aside: perhaps Twitter, in one sense, is the noosphere - the entire sphere of human thought, delivered in tantalising 140 character fragments).

The response to Jeremiah's post has been remarkable, with more than 300 comments at the time I'm writing this - 300 new people for Jeremiah to follow on Twitter (yikes!). I really like his succinct, poetic restatement of Metcalfe's Law:

The Fabric becomes stronger as the Threads connect

As it happens, I came across Jeremiah's post just as I was having a conversation with a client about corporate policies to address employees' use of social media tools and spaces such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

It's a topic that often comes up in my discussions with clients and one I've been watching with interest for the last five years or so. The first time I came across something approximating a corporate blogging policy was listening to the advice of Cathy Reuben, a labour and employment lawyer, at one of the first big blogging conferences back in 2003. Cathy was kind enough to sit with me after her panel session so that I could write up a post from her presentation notes. Reading that post over again now, I think her advice for blogging employees and employers still holds up pretty well.

There have been all kinds of developments in the realm of "acceptable use" guidelines, advice and policies since then, from the benign to the ridiculous. I guess every organization needs to look at this space from their own perspective and figure out what's going to work within their culture.

Clearly, as Twitter and other nano-blogging, micro-personal-broadcasting "conversation ecosystem" things continue to grow, the membrane gets more and more porous. I love that. But there are punters out there concerned about how tools like Twitter and environments such as Facebook could be used for competitive intelligence and other nefarious uses.

I'm sure some of the chaps meeting round the table at the recently-launched big business Blog Council are having conniptions about precisely this kind of thing. Or, to be fair, the main participants at the Blog Council are probably all cool and Gonzo about what's going on with Twitter and the like - happy to watch their colleagues frolic freely in the untrammeled, bucolic innocence of the social media meadow. But I bet there's some over-suited corporate lawyers hovering in the background, quietly breaking into a flop sweat.

It's a quandary. This is the same battleground we've been fighting back and forth over for years. I can recall lengthy, heated discussions with CEOs, clients, and colleagues about whether they should respond to (actual, physical) letters of complaint from clients. Later, it was whether or not to read and respond to postings in web discussion forums. Then, what happens when your employees (or even your CEO) are caught posting anonymously? And what do you do about leaks? Or the fact that you can now see that your team mate spent the last 3 hours playing goddam Scrabulous on Facebook, when they were supposed to be drafting that report for you.

The more porous the membrane between you and the outside world, the greater the alignment between you, your colleagues, and your customers, as Hugh said. Yes. But eek!

As Lionel Menchaca put it: "Transparency is still key, but the reality for large corporations is that there are some things we can't discuss," - and some things you definitely don't want to find your employees posting links to online.

For the record, the client I happened to be chatting with when I came across Jeremiah's post are EXTREMELY clueful. They really don't want to get into anything heavy-handed, but they have good reason to be concerned about the lovely leakiness of social media, simply because a lot of their work involves handling really confidential client-related stuff, and not everyone has the good sense to observe the boundaries of good common sense.

So. It's just pragmatic to expect that policies of some kind are inevitable and, from a disclosure point of view, necessary. Not One Policy To Rule Them All, though. Thoughtful, specific policies that work for your organisation. You can't buy this kind of thing off the shelf.

Although, that reminds me...

One of the other things I referenced in my comment at Jeremiah's post was something I've mentioned in presentations and client discussions a few times: "The Earl Gilmore Rulebook". I first heard something of Earl's story from Doc Searls a long time ago. Earl founded a software company some time around 1980 - way back when you could call a startup something as simple and literal as "Business Application Systems" without fear of ambiguity.

As Doc tells it, Earl's entire employee manual consisted of two pages, with one rule per page:

Rule #1: Use good judgement.
Rule #2: Violate Rule #1 and you're in deep shit.

To my mind, that still stands as one of the best, general purpose, all-encompassing HR policies I've ever come across.

OK, so it may not work for everyone. To that end, I've started to collect a list o' links to other examples of social media policies from far and wide, and a handful of interesting articles about this question. If you're interested, I've bookmarked them at my del.icio.us account, here.

Meanwhile, an interesting side effect of the comment I left on Jeremiah's post is that I seem to have picked up about 20 new Twitter followers in the last couple of hours. Welcome, friendly stalkers!

Nasty story here of how the thin dividing line between editorial and advertising departments at a major media company can sometimes get all blurred and ugly. I'm a little late to this one, but it's still worth a link.

According to this piece on the Pronet Advertising blog, a key game reviewer at Gamespot was fired after embarrassing a major advertising client with a candid, critical review of one of their latest games.

The short version of the story, from Pronet contributor David Chen:

"If you haven't been paying attention these past few days, here is the basic story, told largely through rumors and unattributed, though plausible, sources: Gerstmann, a 10-year veteran of the industry, was abruptly fired last Thursday for a negative review of "Kane and Lynch," a game published by Eidos Interactive. Eidos had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads on the site and was apparently able to use the contract to pressure CNET into forcing Gerstmann out of a job."

Ouch. The reviewer, Jeff Gerstmann, was later interviewed by MTV reporter Stephen Totilo. It's worth reading the full piece, but here's a quick excerpt from one of Jeff Gerstmann's responses quoted in Totilo's post:

"As for the future of game journalism, you asked if it’s realistic for readers to expect a church and state separation between editorial and sales. Realistic or not, I think readers should demand that from a publication. Some people probably think that’s a little old-fashioned or hopelessly idealistic, given the changing nature of advertising these days, but there you go."

I like it. He is, like so many of us, swimming against the rising tide - but it's still an incredibly important principle to uphold. There's an entire three-day conference worth of material in the issues surrounding this one, but I have a meeting to get to.

Just a quick pointer to Dave Fleet's excellent write-up about last night's Third Tuesday event at Fionn McCool's in Toronto. I think Dave does a great job of capturing the essence of Richard Binhammer's informal talk.

Terrific night, IMHO. We had about 75 or so people who kept the conversation flowing with plenty of tough questions about Dell's enthusiastic participation in the social media space. Really good to hear the inside track from such a huge company - Richard's candid insights and anecdotes helped put a human face on the challenges faced by companies the size of Dell in embracing blogs internally and externally.

Uck. I'm starting to sound like one of those newly-minted soshul meejah consultants. Time to shut up. If you missed last night's gig, or even if you were there, just go read Dave's piece.