Blog This Space

MSN Spaces displays the heart of darkness at the core of the proprietary model - the new blog service targets home users, but, as Xeni notes, the MSN Spaces terms of use are broad, to say the least

6. MATERIALS YOU POST OR PROVIDE; COMMUNICATIONS MONITORING
For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2)sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission. Microsoft may remove your Submission at any time. For each Submission, you represent that you have all rights necessary for you to make the grants in this section. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsoft may monitor your e-mail, or other electronic communications and may disclose such information in the event it has a good faith reason to believe it is necessary for purposes of ensuring your compliance with this Agreement, and protecting the rights, property, and interests of the Microsoft Parties or any customer of a Microsoft Party

While blogger.com might not have a spiffy interface, and be run by another mega-corporation, somehow, I'm not going anywhere else. A thought - what if I posted a Creative Commons-licensed blog on MSN Spaces? Would that invalidate the MSN or the Commons license?

Finalement, if it adds to the creative mania of 10000 bloggers in pyjamas, the more the merrier - ref Milan Kundera's notes on graphomania

"The irresistable proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down the streets and shout: 'We are all writers!'

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

Discussion on MSN Spaces here

Update: Naughty goodness continues - this could become a new blog-hobby (blobby?)