Chapter 4
Blogging by the Rules
In This Chapter
• Crediting your sources
• Understanding copyright laws
• Finding images you can use on your blog
• Creating your own blog policies
• Following WordPress’s rules
When you start a blog using WordPress and join the world of online publishing, you must follow a variety of written and unwritten rules. Laws and ethics apply to every blogger, and you must follow them if you want to stay out of legal trouble and remain a welcome member of the blogging community.
This chapter introduces you to some of the legal and ethical considerations that affect you as a blogger. You also learn how to create your own blog policies and establish a user experience your visitors can rely on. Additionally, you learn what you need to do to avoid violating any WordPress policies.
Using Links and Providing Attribution
When you write a blog post about a topic you found via another blog or website, you should attribute your source with a link. Give credit where credit is due. Not only is it the right thing to do ethically, but it can help your blog grow, thanks to WordPress’s trackback function.
DEFINITION
A trackback is a virtual shoulder tap from one blog to another. When you publish a blog post that includes a link to another blog that has enabled its trackback function, the link to your blog post is published within the comments section of the other blog.
An example of a trackback published in the comments section of a WordPress blog is shown in Figure 4-1. Some other blogging applications, like TypePad, publish trackbacks as well, but these trackbacks are not automated. You need to insert the source URL in the Send Trackbacks To field within your WordPress post editor in order for those trackbacks to publish on the source blog. (Don’t worry about how to do this right now. I discuss it in detail in Chapter 9.)
Figure 4-1 A trackback publishes as a comment on a WordPress blog post.
Trackbacks can help boost traffic to your blog because people who read the other blog where the trackback is published can follow the link to read your blog post, too. The trackback also notifies the other blogger that you linked to his content in your own post. It’s a great way to reach out to another blogger to show him you helped share his content and begin to form a relationship with him.
Following Copyright Laws
It bears repeating: you must link to and provide attribution for your sources. Bloggers who publish content on the public Internet are bound by copyright laws. You don’t want to be accused of plagiarizing another person’s work, so it’s imperative that you always publish original content on your blog and properly cite your sources.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION
The
WordPress.com Terms of Service prohibit copyright violations.
A gray area of copyright law, called fair use, affects bloggers. Under fair use, publishers can republish another person’s content to add commentary or for educational purposes. However, the safest course of action for a blogger is to only republish snippets from other sources along with a link to that source. Also, add your own opinion to the snippet, so the vast majority of content on your blog is original.
Following this guideline will help you stay out of legal trouble and ensure your search engine rankings are not negatively affected, because sites that simply republish content from other sites are often penalized or banned from search engine results. (I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 18.)
What Images Can You Use on Your Blog?
A very common question among bloggers—both beginner and seasoned bloggers—is related to using images on blogs and in blog posts. Copyright laws protect the original owner of any work, and images are protected by copyright laws just as words and music are. It might seem like a great idea to create a celebrity gossip blog and link to pictures you find on entertainment sites, but doing so is likely to be a violation of copyright laws.
To use an image on your blog without violating any laws, you need permission. You can get permission by requesting it from the image owner, or you can find sources that provide images with copyrights attached to them that allow you to republish them on your blog. The most common copyright licenses you need to understand are: rights-managed, royalty-free, and Creative Commons.
Rights-Managed
Rights-managed copyright licenses are based on usage and require that you either pay the owner for the rights to use the images on your blog or get permission to use the images on your blog. Typically, you must pay a fee each time you want to use a rights-managed image.
Royalty-Free
Royalty-free copyrighted images typically come with a price tag, but you can pay one time and use the purchased image again and again. Some royalty-free images don’t have price tags but do come with restrictions that require you to credit the source or perform other actions in order to use them as dictated by the image owner. Royalty-free images are often referred to as stock images.
An example of a site that offers royalty-free images is stock.XCHNG (
sxc.hu), which offers both images for free (with restrictions attached) and for a fee.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (
creativecommons.org) is an organization that helps owners of original works share those works in a less-restrictive manner than copyright laws allow. Creative Commons offers six types of licenses:
• Attribution: Anyone can republish the work with proper attribution to the owner.
• Attribution Share Alike: Anyone can modify the work in any way and republish it with proper attribution to the owner as long as the new version of the work is licensed using the same Creative Commons license as the original work.
• Attribution No Derivatives: Anyone can republish the work with proper attribution to the owner as long as no changes are made to the work.
• Attribution Non-Commercial: Anyone can republish the work for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution to the owner.
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike: Anyone can modify the work in any way and republish it for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution to the owner as long as the new version of the work is licensed using the same Creative Commons license as the original work.
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: Anyone can republish the image for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution to the owner and as long as no changes are made to the work.
You can learn more about finding images you can use on your blog and inserting them into your posts in Chapter 10.
Be Mindful of Spam
The last thing you want as a blogger is to earn a reputation as a spammer, which you can unintentionally do if you break some of the unwritten rules of WordPress or the blogosphere. The social web is a great place to promote yourself, your business, and so on, but members of the blogosphere don’t like self-promoters. The key to growing your blog and your online reputation is to use indirect self-promotion. So then what’s a blogger to do to promote her blog?
DEFINITION
A spammer is someone who floods the Internet with messages of a solicitous nature. This is particularly common on the social web, which is the term used to describe the evolution of the Internet where user-generated content and two-way conversations via the use of tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, became common means of global communications.
I tell you how to correctly promote you blog later in Chapter 21. But for now, let’s look at what not to do. Following a few ground rules should keep you from being labeled as a spammer.
Don’t leave comments on other blogs filled with links. It’s tempting, but don’t do it. Instead, use the URL field in the blog comment form for your self-promotional link.
Don’t leave comments on other blogs that don’t add value to the conversation. Be sure to say something interesting, or blog owners will think you’re just trying to get a free link back to your own blog.
Don’t clutter other bloggers’ e-mail in-boxes with link requests and other self-promotional content. Instead of annoying other bloggers, send them information they’ll find interesting and start to develop a relationship with them that will help you build your blog in the long term.
The more time you spend blogging and reading other blogs, the easier it will be for you to identify the tactics and behaviors members of the blogosphere frown upon. Once you gain a reputation as a spammer or a blogger who flouts the ethics of blogging, it’s very difficult to get off the blogger blacklist.
Creating Policies
Your blog is your own space on the web, and depending on your goals, you can publish the type of content you want and not publish the type of content you don’t want. That’s where blog policies come into the picture. Policies are intended to protect you and your audience as well as set expectations about the type of content that will or will not be published on your blog.
You need to establish three primary types of blog policies:
• Comment policy
• Privacy policy
• Terms and conditions of use policy
There’s no set format or text you’re required to use in your blog policies—in fact, publishing blog policies is entirely up to you. But it’s important to understand the basic purposes of blog policies and what information is typically found in them so you can create the most appropriate policies for your own blog.
Comment Policy
As your blog grows and your posts receive more and more comments, you’ll undoubtedly receive comments you don’t want to publish on your blog or that require minor editing before you’ll publish them. For example, hateful comments that attack individuals usually aren’t welcome on blogs, and comments that include obscenities could be offensive. Similarly, comments that might be spam can hurt the user experience on your blog and should be deleted.
A comment policy allows you to define what types of comments you will delete or edit using the comment moderation tools in your WordPress account. Your comment policy also protects you, so you can refer visitors whose comments are edited or deleted to your established policy to understand why their comments were revised or not published at all.
Following is a sample blog comment policy. It can help you get started in writing your own policy for your blog.
Comments submitted to this blog may be edited or deleted in the following situations: 1. Comments that are considered spam or potential spam will be deleted. This includes comments that are irrelevant or with multiple links that are irrelevant to the blog post to which they are attached.
2. Comments including profanity will be edited or deleted.
3. Comments that could be deemed offensive will be deleted.
4. Comments that attack a person or entity will be deleted.
The owner of this blog reserves the right to edit or delete any comments submitted to this blog at her own discretion and without notice. This comment policy is subject to change at any time and without notice.
Privacy Policy
A privacy policy is used to tell visitors to your blog about the kind of information you collect when they visit your blog and what information you share with third parties. For example, some blog advertising programs require that the advertiser be able to collect and store information about visitors to your blog in order to serve more appropriate ads in the future. If you participate in this type of program, it’s likely that the advertising program will require you to publish a privacy policy on your blog explaining the type of information collected about each visitor and what that data is used for.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION
Be wary of publishing ads from advertisers that collect or share information about visitors to your blog but do not require that you publish a privacy policy outlining their tactics. If private information is collected about your blog visitors (even if it’s done by a third-party advertiser), you are required by law to disclose that it’s happening.
Similarly, if you use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics (
google.com/analytics), StatCounter (
statcounter.com), or Site Meter (
sitemeter.com) to track your blog’s performance based on visits to your blog, you’re collecting information about visitors’ travels across your blog. You should publish a privacy policy on your blog that explains the type of information collected and why.
Here’s a sample, generic privacy policy for a blog that does track analytics but does not collect or share any other kind of visitor data. Use it to help you get started in creating your own policy for your blog.
We do not share personal information or behavioral information with third parties. We do not store information we collect about your visit to this blog for use other than to analyze content performance through the use of cookies, which you can turn off at any time by modifying your web browser’s settings. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other websites or media without our permission. This privacy policy is subject to change at any time and without notice.
Terms and Conditions of Use Policy
You should publish a terms and conditions of use policy on your blog to protect you. It outlines everything people agree to by visiting your blog.
QUICK TIP
You may want to consult with an attorney to ensure your blog policies fully protect you from potential lawsuits and other threats.
Following is a generic sample terms and conditions of use policy you can use to write your own.
The content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in the information available on this site or by following any link on this site nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. These terms and conditions of use are subject to change at any time and without notice.
Keep in mind that blog policies are meant to accomplish two primary goals: establish visitor expectations and protect you. Take some time to read policies on other blogs, create your own to meet your needs, and provide the full disclosures and protection you require.
WordPress Policies
WordPress has its own policies users must adhere to or risk having their blogs deleted. This primarily applies to
WordPress.com users, but
WordPress.org users must follow policies related to using the WordPress application as well as policies from their web hosting providers.
You can view the WordPress policies at these pages:
While these policies seem lengthy and complicated, they’re actually fairly easy to understand. Take the time to read through the policies that apply to you, depending on the version of WordPress you use, and adhere to them at all times.
The Least You Need to Know
• You must credit your sources and avoid violating copyright laws on your blog.
• Avoid being labeled a spammer or publishing spam on your own blog. If you don’t, you risk gaining a negative reputation among the blogging community or violating WordPress policies.
• Publishing your own blog policies can protect you from some ethical and legal entanglements.
• If you use WordPress, you must read and adhere to WordPress’s policies at all times.
