Law & Entrepreneurship News

Archives: Administration

Summer Long-term Hiatus

Law & Entrepreneurship News will be taking a break for the summer, but we plan to be back in the fall with a new cast of editors and perhaps some other changes. A long break.

We had high hopes in the beginning, and we enjoyed the experiment. But our model was not sustainable. We might stage a comeback someday, but for now the site is dormant.

Thanks to all of our readers. We appreciate your support and the many wonderful comments that we have received via email.

Our First Blogchild!

Students at the University of Illinois have recently launched a blog called The Journal of the Business Law Society. If I have the story right, this new venture was partly inspired by Law & Entrepreneurship News. We have added the blog to our blogroll, and hope to add other student business blawgs in the future.

Law & Entrepreneurship News is News

This blog was featured in the Wisconsin State Journal today. Well, not exactly featured, but we appear as  "a serious blog about law news." Also, two of our editors -- Zack Wyatt and Chris Anderson -- are quoted. I am quoted, too, and I talk about the story a bit more on Conglomerate.

Our New Search Engine

Last week, I received a complaint from one of our readers about offensive ads showing up in our Google site searches. I contacted Google. I was not happy with their response. We now have a new search engine from SiteLevel, and I like it. If you are interested in my correspondence with Google, read on.

This was my original email to Google:

Dear Google,

I was very disturbed to receive the following message from one of my blog's readers. Can you do anything about this? Or should I remove Google search from my blog?

Gordon

>Subject: Offensive Google ads via your website

>Dear Prof. Smith,

>I came across your blog while searching the Internet (using Google) to
>find information comparing women's participation in entrepreneurship
>and business around the world. When I got to your site
>I skimmed some of the articles there and saw they didn't cover the
>information I was interested in.  I then entered "women" in your
>search box, which generated a google search of your site. However,
>I couldn't help noticing that ALL the Google-generated ads on the
>right of the "hits" were for either pornographic or blatantly sexist content.

>I find this situation extremely disturbing and downright offensive.
>Of course, it is no fault of your own, and one might argue it is no
>fault of Google's either - since they use some kind of blind algorithm
>to generate such ads.  I use Google on virtually a daily basis,
>and most of the time, with some discomfort, I just ignore this "noise"
>generated by any of my searches online. One could argue
>that freedom of expression allows such ads to show up regardless
>of one's personal preference for them. However, someone (Google,
>for a start) is making money off of this practice, and I would like
>to register my protest in the hope that you will consider
>suspending the use of Google, or complaining to them about such
>blind keyword-generated ads wholly antithetical to the spirit of the
>search, or using a search engine on your site that does not feed ads
>to your website's visitors. Much as I admire its strong search capabilities
>to find material of interest to me, I myself am considering boycotting
>Google, with its increasingly hard-to-ignore, irrelevant and inappropriate
>advertising

>In any case, I thought I should let you (and your research advisor)
>know what this visitors' experience was like.

This was Google's response:

Hello Gordon,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you saw an inappropriate
advertisement on a Google results page.

The advertisement you saw was generated through the AdWords program, which is designed to give thousands of small business owners the power to quickly and efficiently generate traffic to their sites. The ads they create run on our site immediately. Our editorial staff reviews all ads to make sure that they are appropriate for our site. Since we show ads immediately, there is often a short period of time when the ad is running before being reviewed and approved by Google AdWords Specialists. Please note that we try to keep this lag as short as possible. Unfortunately, it seems you saw the advertisement before we had a chance to review it.

Please accept our apologies. We thank you for your patience and continuing support. (emphasis added)

Well, that is just silly. If you search for "women" using Google, you get ads for "sexsearch," "see photos of hot women," "sexy adult personals," "date someone's wife today," etc. I told Google: "This is offensive. If these ads are 'appropriate for our site,' then your site is not appropriate for me. I have taken Google search down."

The SiteLevel search engine is just as easy and seems to do just as well in terms of results as Google. The results display ads, but I didn't see anything like those from Google.

RSS Feeds

Through the diligent efforts of Zack Wyatt, our Copyright & Trademark Editor, we now have separate RSS feeds for each category. If you would like to subscribe to any of the categories, grab the relevant url from our RSS Feeds page, which you can always access by clicking the orange XML icon ... XML

Official Launch!!!

Thank you for visiting Law & Entrepreneurship News, a collaborative weblog project involving Professor Gordon Smith and students at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The purpose of this project is to provide links and commentary on recent developments relating to law and entrepreneurship. For the past week, we have been writing and posting stories, developing the website, and working out some of the initial kinks in the project. During that time, we have received many favorable notices from friends, such as Ann Althouse, Steve Bainbridge, WisBlawg, BoleyBlogs!, Law Dawg Blawg, and Ideoblog, among others. Finally, the time has come to invite the world to our site.

We still have work to do, but we invite you to take a look around our new home. You will find 17 topic areas dealing with a wide range of legal issues affecting entrepreneurial ventures. To read all of the entries on a particular topic, simply click the appropriate link in the lefthand sidebar. Each topic is being developed by a student editor. If you are interested in reading about the editors, try the About Us page. (Check back soon for a complete gallery of photos.)

In the near future, we will be offering separate RSS feeds for each of our topics. (Thanks to reader Dennis D. Crouch of Patently Obvious for this excellent suggestion.) If you are particularly interested in only a few of the topics, therefore, you will be able to track updates to those topics with ease. In addition, we are looking forward to the development of our blogroll. To aid the search for quality blogs, we have decided to list only those blogs that have received the approval of our editors. Look for the results of our first evaluation soon. Moreover, we will be offering a series of blog reviews by Dan McAlvanah, one of our student editors. If you have ideas for other features that you would like to see here or blogs that you think should be nominated for our blogroll, please drop us a line. In the meantime, welcome to Law & Entrepreneurship News!

Our Photos

In preparation for our official launch on September 1, we are sprucing up the site. Among other things, we have recently added photos from the University of Wisconsin's Campus Photo Library in the left sidebar. We selected photographs of various businesses or technologies that are associated with Madison or the University of Wisconsin. You can view a random photo from our collection by refreshing your browser, or you can view the entire gallery of photos. Enjoy!

Official Launch Scheduled: September 1!

We have selected September 1 as the date of our official launch. You will begin to see posts on this site beginning today, as we begin to build content for the site, but we will not have all pistons firing until next week. As always, we invite your comments and hope that you will link to the site.

Our Blogroll

Through the diligent efforts of Dan McAlvanah, one of our student editors, we have created blogrolls with links to our favorite entrepreneurship blogs, economics blogs, marketing blogs, technology blogs, and business blawgs. We have been selective, choosing only blogs with a consistent flow of high-quality content. We assume that our (future) readers are interested in accessing excellent content quickly, so these links will not be awarded cheaply. That said, the blogrolls are works in progress, so look for more additions prior to our official launch on September 1.

We are also excited to announce that Dan will be writing blog reviews throughout the year. Dan is a former restaurant critic in New York, where he was nominated for the prestigious James Beard Journalism Award for Internet Writing. At the time, Dan was working for Citysearch.com, but we are fortunate to have him on our team.

Inaugural Board of Editors

The inaugural board of editors of Law & Entrepreneurship News is now in place. All law students at the University of Wisconsin Law School, the editors have diverse backgrounds and interests, but I have been impressed with their excitement for the project. Things will continue to be pretty quiet around here until the official launch in September, but we all hope that you will come back then.