Terms of Service agreements don’t apply to most blogs.

This morning I was involved in a short discussion about Terms of Service (TOS) and started thinking about how they apply to most blogs. How often do you read the TOS of sites that you don’t register for? In my case, the answer is almost never. I don’t remember the last time I’ve read a TOS policy on a blog.

So imagine my surprise when a blogger actually had a Terms of Service policy and kept track of who was and wasn’t following it like Paul did recently. He then used those who didn’t follow the policy as an example of people not reading Terms of Service policies. Yeah, just deeplinked him again violating this policy.

Relax, he wasn’t serious. He was trying to make a statement about a company that has an anti-deeplinking policy. Paul didn’t really intend to have a policy on his blog that discouraged deeplinking, he just wanted to show that others if they even read it, wouldn’t follow it. Of course they wouldn’t read a policy like this on a blog. Now if he had a site that involved registration/login and did that there I think his experiment results would have been different.

When will it be time to add a TOS?
Five months from now this blog will be four years old. We’ve never had a TOS at Hmm and have seen no need to add one because we don’t really have a formal registration function. I’ve encouraged interested writers to register using the blog software and submit posts before but never really promoted it beyond a post or two. Unsurprisingly, the idea never really went anywhere and don’t even think registration is allowed any longer (didn’t check before making this post).

Perhaps we will add some sort of community function before or after our four year blog anniversary but until we do I see no reason to create a TOS. The TOS is useful primarily for sites that actually offer site registration related and community-oriented services.

What are we signing up for and what are the terms of our service at a blog with no registration/login function? In a blog it’s either there and updated or not. You get the RSS feed or you read it in your browser, but where is the community registration/login? The only service we have here is whether the blog is up and updated or down and not updated. That’s a real easy TOS agreement to write and I could do it in two sentences:

If you visit and the site is up, you are free to read and agree or disagree and leave a comment so long as you follow our comment policy. If the site is down please check back a little later because we’re probably making changes to improve the site in some interesting way.

There are readers and RSS subscribers, sure, there’s definitely a community feel. It would be silly for me to suggest that there is no community at all at blogs like this one — and I’m not — but when you are registered for something it feels differently, doesn’t it? What do you think? Terms of service are most applicable for sites where people need to register, login and use a service of some kind.

Then again, some people use TOS to define what others can do at their sites, including whether or not images can be hotlinked or deeplinking is allowed by other publishers. Since copyright covers a lot of this including in TOS could be overkill. Pictured to the right above is Google’s Terms of Service which definitely makes sense for them, despite the fact you can make Google searches without signing up for anything.

I don’t hotlink images without permission and try to do so rarely even with permission. I’m unsure of the quality and performance of other site’s hosting companies while I know what our own hosting situation and performance is like. Even some very big sites overextend themselves with ‘hey link to us stuff’ and then the images or services end up serving broken content or slowing down the sourcing site (in the case of Javascript includes). That’s not the type of content and experience I want to share here. Doesn’t mean this site won’t be down sometimes too (it has and will be sometimes in the future), but our biggest enemy as of this writing is comment and trackback spambots, not the activity of readers.

Having a TOS that prohibits these comment/trackback bots wouldn’t stop them from slamming this blog. Need to deal with that, and trying to do so, programmatically. The best way, frankly.

I regularly read the terms of service for sites I register for and the EULA of software I download and use and have been turned away after reading some of these terms.

Having a TOS just to have one seems pretty silly to me. Just like having a formal comment policy when your blog doesn’t receive many comments. We didn’t add a comment policy until we actually needed one (thousands of comments and hundreds of different commenters) and yet I see some blogs with lengthy comment policies and no comments in sight. Don’t create policies and procedures and legal documents until it’s necessary to do so. They tend to run readers off more than help encourage more of them to take part in what you’re doing.

Some might call this being more professional having all these policies and procedures but for something like a blog where you are trying to get more personal with the audience … why?

Will there ever be a community feature at Hmm?
There hasn’t been any need to create a community feature that requires an official registration login here to date. There is currently no effort to collect email addresses and build a mailing list. Yes, I know there is a subscribe to the RSS feed by email feature using the third party service Feedblitz and any time you leave a comment here it requires an email address, but those aren’t used for anything other than the stated purposes.

I’ve pondered doing a newsletter but then what would the newsletter do? What would it offer for readers that they can’t get here already in the RSS? Why would anybody want to subscribe?

One idea would be to offer subscribers access to unpublished material. Before you think that something unpublished always or even usually means the crap we don’t or won’t publish, then think again. There are some posts I’m really proud of that didn’t get published here for several reasons. Some of those reasons might intrigue readers and present an opportunity for publication elsewhere. I’ve been thinking about this awhile and the thought continues to be attractive and not go away. Given enough time with an idea that doesn’t go away, I’ll usually act upon it.

I’ve written before about doing this at another intentionally similar domain called nakedyougohmm.com which is registered but isn’t launched (yet?). I’m not a big fan of more email so a newsletter by email only doesn’t appeal to me in the way another website with content that wasn’t offered here would. The other thing I’ve mentioned about the nakedyougohmm site is that it would be a place to allow me to talk about more adult-oriented subjects in much greater depth that interest me. Just remember that the word “naked” in the domain doesn’t necessarily mean porn either. It also doesn’t mean it will be a place where I’ll be getting naked.

(Although just to shock some readers I wouldn’t completely rule that possibility out)

Seriously, I doubt anybody wants to see me naked LOL.

Now what if people want to subscribe to the non-adult unpublished Hmm posts but would rather not read any X-rated type posts? With new services like Yahoo Pipes that allow mixing and mashing RSS feeds, I think it would be easier to allow readers this type of functionality and power but I’d have to review their TOS to see if they would allow use of their program at a primarily adult site.

Last week, for those interested, I covered Yahoo Pipes over at our group blog. I’m intrigued by the possibilities of Pipes for creating individually customized RSS feeds from single (or multiple) publications. I would like to work on something Pipes oriented for here too, so keep your eye on the Hmm Labs.

Speaking of not even in the Hmm Labs I’ve been working on a few things in the background that would require some sort of registration/login, but that would be for additional features and functionality beyond what is already offered here. I love the idea that people can stop by and read what they are most interested in here using their favorite RSS reader. You can subscribe or unsubscribe the RSS feed(s) any time you want. Reader power all the way.

Wait for the TOS stuff. There will be times and places that Terms of Service policies make perfect sense. Blogs? In most cases no.

• Stepping up forced registration for online news
• Thanks for showing us how NOT to ask for comments, Scifi.com
• Ourmedia.org off to rocky start
• To default check or not email notification?
• How to contribute to MakeYouGoHmm [site news]
• Getting suggestions from a third party site with Should Do This