AUUG November meeting :: Legal Concerns on Blogger & GPLv3

7:26pm last night, I finally made my way into the HP building across I-285 from Perimeter Mall. I couldn't find the front entry with some contruction blocked some part of the road, so I pulled in wherever I can into the only standing-tall building. A few employees passed me from the next lane and were kind enough to roll down their windows to inform me that a badge is required for after-hour access. I buzzed the security guy. Once I told him that I was here for the AUUG meeting, he attempted to buzz me in a few times, to no avail. So, he dispatched someone to come down to get it for me. While I was parking my car, he was standing there holding the door for me. I am really touched.
The presentation is on legal considerations for Bloggers and legal implications of new provisions in GPLv3. It is well done by two lawyers from Manning, Morris, and Somebody, a local law firm and one of the corporate sponsors of AUUG. I knew Linus was not a fan of GPLv3 because of some of the restrictive clauses. It is much clear made the presenter, the motivation behind it is some kinda vendetta against commercialism of some sort by an academic and a pure idealist.

Let me quote below the three most problematic clauses in GPLv3, as discussed in the presentation

• patent retaliation
• bundle rights
  
• no locked key [ The lawyer's own research ]
  

Blogger :: a work in progress, beta or not

I joined Technorati and I learned it is supposedly a great thing to have proper label (Blogger's or Google's terminology) or tags (Technorati's term). A few nights back. I started to retrofit my then fifty some posts with labels. I selected a post to edit, added a label or two, then published it again. Back to the main 'edit posts' screen, all the posts looked the same, with or without labels. I said to myself, wouldn't it be great the labels be showed next to the associated post?!

Today I resumed my label-retrofitting task. Lo & behold, the 'edit posts' page has all current labels displayed, just like Gmail does for each messages. Wow, progress!

Editing posts, I noticed the oldest few have hard breaks (
) which broke the lines. The new posts don't have this problem, even if all of them were posted from Gmail.

face lift :: switched to Blogger beta (continued)

Other nice features (some are more like bug fixes) are

• perma link if you click on the title of any post
  
• secondary bullets work now. Before Blogger beta, secondary bullets were automatically promoted, even though the HTML code ( UL embedded inside UL) and WYSIWYG editors on Blogger's 'Post Edit' or Gmail's composer shows proper layout of double indented secondary bullets.
  
• the mysterious slice of the text ad link on top of my blog disappeared.
  
• The editor used to 'edit posts' has two tabs. One is 'Edit Html'. The other is 'Compose'. Those two should really be 'simple WYSIWYG editing' versus 'advanced HTML coding'. I'll leave it to the legend of creative workers at Google/Blogger to cook up proper pair of names.
• The use cases for the multi-blog feature are not as thought-through as other features. The profiles(about-me) share the same profile. As a test, I created a private blog. Email post to that blog doesn't work yet. Two emails were returned with permanent error by alpha1.blogger.com or something to that effect. Since the blogger id is the same, I wondered which blog of the two I own under the Google account should the email post be directed to. Since I had only one blog before Blogger beta, so I wouldn't know whether this is an old bug/feature or not.

face lift :: switched to Blogger beta

Experimenting a blog on Wordpress.com, I liked many features. Yet to find time to try the open-source blog hosting software itself from wordpress.org. However, I was very disappointed to find Wordpress.com strips down the Wordpress blog software. Even html code to insert a Google adsense ad for Firefox was stripped out. Blogger has great support for adsense and such. However, it doesn't do static page. It is pretty desirable to have static page to hold, say, some static contents.

Sigh, do I really have to host my own? As a systems engineer by trade, I really don't need the hassle of hosting. Only if I can get the features I need for free. Only if Blogger can do 'page' to hold semi-static content.

Why not?! I googled for it. Among the first links, I found a link to 'Blogger beta' talking about new features with widgets and such. Click through and end up switched this blog to the new Blogger BETA.

Changes that met my eyes are:

• blogger account is now assimilated to your google account

In other words, now Blogger is yet another Google service, side by side with Gmail, calendar, maps, search, spreadsheets, and such.

• Template is now widgetized:
• Pros: You move blocks (widgets) around on a page layout. I guess they copy the behavior of WordPress. I got to say it is such a nice feature.
  
• Pros: Arbitrary html/javascript can be used to create a widget of your own.
• Cons: A custom widget should have an extra label of sort so you can distinguish which is which on the page layout when you come back to edit. Currently, it only has a title, which is displayed on the actual blog. Imagine if you have more than one custom widgets.
• Cons: Ad-sense widget couldn't be added, generating some error. I wonder if it is because my adsense account has different password. Search-box html code copied to a custom widget doesn't work quite right either. In fact, you can see a text ad link on top of my blog and a image ad link on the right column. I didn't asked for the top link! == as always, Google has wisely branded it as 'BETA'.
  
• access control is in place, replacing the current membership. Yet another feature copied from WordPress, I assume.
  
• authors can be added to co-own the blog
  
• access can be changed from Public (the default) to private
  

Blog is not part of the Web -- overengineering at Google ?

More often than not, when I search for a non-mainstream topic, I couldn't find it in Web or Group using Google search. However, search by 'blog' may get me a boat-load of results. I wonder why Google doesn't integrate blogs into its web search.

Blogs are mainly addition/appending, just like regular web page. Therefore blogs should be friendly enough to lend themselves to the same storage and indexing algorithms Google uses for web contents. Why bother to separate them into two tab? Even worse, 'blog' is now a few clicks away, instead of just another tab. Is there some over-engineering sprouted at Google ?