If you didn’t read the part1 of this article please visit The Essentials of Blogging – Part1 first.
Use of Images and Pictures
Bloggers need to attract more and more users to their particular blog and comment. To increase the flow of traffic and readership of a blog, bloggers use different measures to make their blog look more attractive. An easy way is to add pictures and thumbnails to your blog so readers can enjoy some pictorial information along with the text as well. To do this the extremely simple way out is to take already present pictures online and put them up along with the text. Though some bloggers make their own picture, which is perhaps the best way to go about it, a majority use the easy way out.
This poses certain privacy infringement issues and plagiarism issues and you cannot simply copy pictures posted by other sources and upload them as yours on our own blog. The Federal Trade Commission states that you can only use pictures if you decrease the size and create thumbnails of the pictures and not simply upload them by slightly decreasing their size and uploading them as your own. Also you are required to provide information and references from where you have taken these pictures.
Be careful about trademarks
Bloggers often create their own domain names that may clash with large company’s trademarks that have been officially registered which might cause you to change your domain name. So before creating a domain name and registering for it, make sure that some other company hasn’t taken it and trademarked it. What you can do is conduct a search online regarding the domain name that you are looking for to make sure that it hasn’t been already taken to prevent a larger organization from suing you since now no one takes copying lightly and you could lose out on a large chunk of money.
Comments from users
Over the years, comments from users have been encouraged by bloggers as they want users to indulge in healthy conversation. However with great power comes great responsibility and one needs to protect their blog and their website from scammers who might write racist comments or might insult you or other users. Even though you do not have the power to stop people from commenting in the first place you can delete them and block those users later on. However, for this to happen, you need to make sure that you keep a regular check on the comments of your blog since other users might blame you for such comments and even sue you when you aren’t responsible.
To cater to this problem, the law states that the blogger is not responsible for any such offensive responses, but should make sure to keep a check and delete them in case any such thing happens.
