I have a completed novel for sale. A terrorist cell takes down the U.S. power grid in a cross-country campaign. The author has intelligence agency, DoD, and law enforcement experience. Anyone know a publisher or a movie producer looking for a property?

One in 4 or 5 bloggers will start a new job this year. Maybe 750 thousand. They and their blogs are at risk.

Ever walk out of a job interview only to discover that you've signed away

(a) your right to blog on your own site,

(b) the freedom to post from work, and

(c) that if you violate a or b, your employer will lay claim to your weblogs, confiscate them, fire you, and sue you?

Employment and confidentiality agreeements frequently have language like this.

I want a piece of paper that I can bring to the interview, that the employer's agent can sign, that preserves my blog, my rights to blog, my ownership of my blog, and explicit freedom from retaliation for anything I post.

I want a similar piece of paper that a union bargaining unit can use.

Is there a Creative Commons style of packaging that can make it easy to create this boilerplate?

Any blawgers who'd care to suggest such language?

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This would allow the inclusion of ads within RSS (not ad boxes, but simple text with the label advertisement).  I really don't want to see ads in my RSS, but it is inevitable.  For qualified content, like what I am working on with the Weblog Network, it is a must.

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Gil Friend:

A larger question here, aside from the direct impact on companies that Cringely flags, is the relationship between micro and macro considerations here. The quest for ever lower labor costs may make competitive sense for individual companies (at least those that view labor as an expense rather than an investment), but what happens as it cuts the purchasing power of the US workforce? What happens as China evolves from a low cost labor haven into a serious technical competitor than can give US (and European) companies a run for their money?

The signs are already showing. Tech companies that moved manufacturing to China to cut labor costs 85% are now finding, to their surprise, quality of engineers, plants and infrasturcture comparable to any in the world.

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