My friend Martin recently has his WordPress blog locked down. It seems the reason they pulled his blog was that he put up a PPP Direct badge on the blog, and WordPress consider that a violation of their terms of service.
PPP Direct is a service we offer at PayPerPost.com that allows people to hire citizen journalists (bloggers) to write about a topic on their blog. It’s not insidious. It’s not deceptive. We require disclosure (that is to say, the blogger making the post on their blog must disclose that they were paid to make the post). It’s not evil. It’s just a way for people to make money writing about stuff they would already write about. Think about that for a second. It’s just online freelance journalism. It provides a way for an advertiser with a small budget to get some exposure to their product or service, and it provides an income for someone that would previously have found the barriers to entry for freelancing unbelievably high.
I scoured the WordPress terms of service, and the only section I can find that would relate to Martin losing his blog is this…
the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);
Martin posted a badge on his site. He didn’t make a post for cash, but only made it clear that he was open to writing for money, just like a journalist. He didn’t publish ‘unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites’, he just put up a badge. And for that he got banned. It’s almost speculative censorship; “OH NO, this guy might make a commercial post, let’s ban him”.
In addition to that though the entry above in the ToS concerns me on so many levels. It’s ok to give link love to Apple for the iPhone, to Microsoft for the products, or to any other company that you are a fan of, as long as you don’t make any money. If you make money for doing it, you’re banned. Huh?
WordPress can do whatever they like with their platform. I’m just totally shocked that for a company with so many links to open source and initiatives like Creative Commons they would go on an all out vendetta against anyone that wants to put food on the table for their family.
So anyone who tries to put google adsense on their blog is also violating their terms and/or will get booted from wordpress? Yea right.
Comment by Eric — July 17, 2007 @ 2:36 pm |
Yes… and no. Refering to the article “Why Google is the service of choice for sploggers” http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2123675,00.html you will find that Matt Mullenweg (the creator) of WordPress was quoted as saying they are not only considering allowing Adsense but making the bloggers pay for it (paragraph 17). The other rediculse thing about all of this is that if WordPress aka Matt is so against blogger advertising then my question is why does Matts’ blog have advertising? http://photomatt.net/2007/07/16/price-of-freedom/
It seems very clear to me that WordPress has taken the easy way out and just plan bans bloggers without any recourse. Whereas practicing what they preach is also not in the norm.
For what it is worth I have submitted three WordPress plug-ins back to back and all were unique to the WordPress.net community. This was over two months ago and I have not heard back from them even after three plug-in release announcements. My only failure was the last one I honestly posted along with the plug-in that it was for my PayPerPost Tools Plug-in. Certainly they have the technology to limit this plug-in from their .com site but certainly the .net site is open.
I mean really I’ve downloaded and installed plug-ins from wordpress.net that have donate buttons right their in the GUI that never go away. So monetizing plug-ins will not get you eliminated.
WordPress is damned elitist!!!1
Comment by Dark Ryder — July 17, 2007 @ 6:53 pm |
Certainly the biggest issue I had with the whole banning issue was that the blog was just taken down without any prior contact; I also couldn’t log-in to my WP account.
Now, given that the ToS does not really make the PPP position clear you’d think it might have been nice if someone at WP could have dropped me an email to say “Hey. PPP ain’t allowed here; please take down your PPP-related badges or we’ll have to ban you”. But no.
Comment by Wolfie — July 18, 2007 @ 1:43 pm |
Seems like WordPress are even more hypocritical than I at first thought; seems they were doing the very same thing they banned me for back in 2005. When they got called on it, much furious about-facing did ensue. Check out this post and the associated links: http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml
Comment by Wolfie — August 22, 2007 @ 9:18 am |