[Infowarrior] - Enough with the "my" moniker...

[Richard Forno]

For better or worse, the local FOX station here in DC is doing a full-court
press to offer all things digital to everyone.   While it's a common thing
for local news stations to undertake such ventures, FOX seems stuck in the
mid-1990s.   Specifically, their main website is "myfoxdc.com" and their
various subordinate 'sites' (really linked/hosted services) like
"mydctrafficcameras" or "myweatherphotos") offered as well.

For no reason in particular I sat through an hour of their local news
tonight and was amazed at how much they hyped the "MY-(whatever)" services
they offer both during their newscast and commercial breaks.  Is it just me,
or is the "my" moniker so Windows 95-ish?   "My Documents", "My Computer",
"My Network Places", and now "My Traffic Cameras", "My Fox DC", and "My
Weather Photos"??   Enough!  Like the i-prefix, it's an outdated term meant
to convey a sense of hipness and webification.

Given the stations' HUGE push toward user-generated content such as blogs
and videos, I was curious what their Terms of Service relating to these
services says.   To my surprise, they're taking the same view that
GeoCities, Yahoo, and others did years ago with regard to blogs and website
hosting. To wit:

" You agree that any content you post becomes the property of FIM. You
understand and agree that FIM and its parent and affiliated companies may
use, publish, copy, sublicense, adapt, edit, distribute, publicly perform,
display and delete the content you post as they see fit. This right will
terminate at the time you remove such content from the Site. Notwithstanding
the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the content posted by you to
the Site may remain on the FIM servers after you have removed such content
from the Site, and FIM retains the rights to those copies."

(Source: http://community.myfoxdc.com/blogs/blogrules.aspx)

Translation: "Anything you post or send to us, we own and can use as we se
fit forever and owe you nothing for it."   IMHO companies (news or whomever)
engaging in such practices under the guise of the current
user-content-is-king philosophy (ie, Web2.0) are simply applying Web1.0 (if
not outdated industrial age) policies to such ventures.....and still don't
understand the nature of the Internet age.

Bleh.

-rick