I should have mentioned this earlier, but

• I'm going to Wiscon!
• Is anyone/who is going to Sirens?

Speaking of fannish diasporas: Del.ic.ious

As far as I'm concerned Yahoo is the black hole of the Internet at this point: whatever goes in, never comes out again. The latest entry on the list of things that Yahoo has ruined is Del.ic.ious--remember when Yahoo fired all of its staff a few months ago as preparation for 'sunsetting' the service? Well, two days ago a deal was announced in which AVOS, which is owned by the founders of YouTube, will buy Delicious from Yahoo. And, like the plebes we are, Delicious users are supposed to rejoice, and more importantly, to agree to transfer our content along with the service this summer.

Not so fast.

AVOS' new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are vastly different from Delicious' current, soon to be former, policies: undefined 'offensive' content is now no longer freely bookmarkable. For fandom, the important quotation is this one:

You agree not to do any of the following: post, upload, publish, submit or transmit any Content that: (…) violates, or encourages any conduct that would violate, any applicable law or regulation or would give rise to civil liability; (iii) is fraudulent, false, misleading or deceptive; (iv) is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, vulgar or offensive (…)

Yup. I'm sure all of us can think of enough copyright takedowns on YouTube (Downfall parodies, anyone?) that we should naturally be chary of the YouTube gusy, and as far as I'm concerned, this seals the deal: Delicious was great while it lasted, but I'm out. Thanks for nothing, Yahoo!, why can't you just go bankrupt and put us out of our misery already.

In the meantime, I've imported my bookmarks to pinboard.in, i.e. pinboard. Accounts are not free, to discourage spammers, and are prorated based on the size of the userbase; currently accounts are $9.32 each. It's a lot like Delicious, and pretty user-friendly so far. I'm starlady there, I hope you'll come join me!