EFF’n a!

Thursday Dec 15th 2005

Just checked out EFF because I haven’t been there in some time just to check things out.

They now have something there that wasn’t before since my last visit: Fighting for Bloggers’ Rights. I scanned it over and it’s all cool information to know. The one that caught the most interest was the whole anonymous blogging thing which mainly concentrates on (in my own words) “How to complain about your job” or moreover “How to complain about your job and get away with it.”

Corporate America hates blogs so much so that you can get fired for it so they can avoid embarrassment and keep the stockholders happy. That much is obvious. EFF offers common sense tips on how to blog anonymously so you can stay in the clear while still blabbing about how much your job sucks.

I have a few tips of my own concerning bloggers’ rights, but before I do that, I just have to say it’s darned unfortunate that some bloggers have actually been fired just for publishing an opinion or two. The fact that it has (and still does) happen is just wrong, so I applaud EFF for putting up a guide about it.

Watch yourself if you put up a “sucks” site.

A “sucks” site is any instance where you put www.[companyname]sucks.com and register it yourself to tell the world how bad a company, well, sucks. The only thing potentially wrong with this is that you are using a company name belonging to another business entity and using it for your own personal gain (in Corporate America’s eyes). The key is to make the site “informatory only” and never, EVER sell anything on it - because then your domain will get yanked faster than you can say “What the…?”

Avoid dot com, dot net and dot org registrations if it’s going to be about your job and how much you hate it.

Lawyers at corporations (should they decide to give you grief) will bug you if you’re blogging about the company on a domain that ends in .com, .net or .org. Even though it’s very common knowledge that coms/nets/orgs aren’t necessarily business entities, COM could mean “commercial”, NET could mean “network” and ORG could mean “organization”. For the dot com, it could be mistaken to be a commercial enterprise. For dot net, this could be taken as a data networking company. For the org, it could mean you have an officially registered organization (which you don’t, obviously). The way to get around this is to register something that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, like dot info, dot ST (like mine) or the like.

Do not include a company name in your domain or blog title for the company you’re complaining about.

This follows the same rules as a “sucks” site. You do not want to give the company you’re complaining about any legal advantage at all. Having a company title contained within your domain name or blog title that doesn’t belong to you legally can potentially bite you back later. The best way around this is to just use an alternative title and have the description (keyword there) to contain the company you want to complain about. So instead of [companyname]sucks.com, use [somethingelse].info. Here’s a tip: Use the company colors in the name. If the company logo has red and white in it, register something like anti-red-white.info with the site description as “A place to list grievances about [company name].”

Accept no money on your site.

Something I’ve seen all too often is that people who have “sucks” sites (and the like) will put up a “donations” link. BAD. Don’t do that. It means you’re accepting money by using another company’s name as a way to get it. BAD, BAD, BAD. There’s lots of free blog sites, domain registrations are less than fifteen dollars a year and there are tons of web hosts who will host your site for thirty dollars a year or less.

As far as I’m concerned, forty-five dollars a year is just for any cause, including having a site to complain about work. If you can’t afford less than fifty bucks a year, get a free blog instead.

“But bandwidth costs a lot!” No it doesn’t. If your site is strictly informatory (which it should be), post no images at all. Make your site completely text based. Text is tiny in file size and easy to manage. If you absolutely have to have images, consider hosting them elsewhere like Flickr, Yahoo! Photos or some other free place and just link from the text that you post on your main site. Bear in mind that blog sites will host your images also - just remember to keep the file size down. Always remember that your TEXT is the most important part of your blog. Without text you have nothing.

Do not sell anything on your site.

I’ve seen some instances where those who have the complainer sites will make a freebie cafepress.com store and sell t-shirts, hats and so on with the domain name in the title. BAD. Repeat: BAD. Sell nothing. Do not take the company you’re complaining about and turn it into commercial enterprise of any kind.

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