Reading the Fine Print

Posted by scoop on January 29th, 2010 in Splogs, Tips, Word Press |

I was browsing the net yesterday when I stumbled on this page:

The ironic thing was that I clicked on a link that was supposed to be giving tips on blogging and contests. I guess the blogger, whose good enough to give tips, didn’t even know the first rule of blogging: Don’t violate rules and if you do, don’t get caught! I mean isn’t that the rule in life?

Anyway this made me think and I realized that I personally haven’t even read Wordpress fine print in its entirety. Come on, who has? The fact that no one really reads every site’s Terms and Conditions doesn’t excuse anyone from suffering the consequences when rules are violated. We all know after all that ignorance of the law excuses no one.

So what does this mean? It simply means that we should all get our act together and start reading the fine print. Starting with that of the services we use to create and maintain our blog – from the hosting service to feed readers and search engines. At least read the most important parts, which for me is the privacy part and the responsibilities part, which is where we find the DONTs.

For now here are some of the DONTs listed on Wordpress’ Terms and Conditions:

1. infringing on proprietary rights
2. content that contains or installs any viruses, worms, malware, Trojan horses or other harmful or destructive content
3. spam
4. content that is pornographic, libelous or defamatory, contains threats or incites violence towards individuals or entities, and violates the privacy or publicity rights of any third party
5. blog name that misleads your readers into thinking that you are another person or company