More reason not to use Blogger or Blogspot for your law blog

More reason not to use Google's free Blogger blog service for your law blogs comes from Loren Baker, Editor of the Search Engine Journal.

As Loren explains, if you have a Blogger blog, this could happen to your blog.

Law Blogs Blogger

How? Look at Google's terms of service.

Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system for some time for back-up purposes.

There are a significant number of lawyers using Google’s Blogger platform and Google’s Blogspot hosting for their blog. As Loren says using the Blogger-Blogspot combination 'takes away the heart of your blog and hands it over to Google. They control your blog, not you.'

What's especially surprising is that it's pretty unlikely these same lawyers would advise their clients to hand over their intellectual capital and marketing materials to a third party and forego all control.

Look at some of the other provisions in the Blogger Terms of Service. Provisions a lawyer would never agree to any contract they would negotiate.

  • General Practices Regarding Use and Storage. You agree that Google has no responsibility or liability for the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Service. Google retains the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time with or without notice.
  • Google also reserves the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as it reasonably believes is necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (b) enforce this Agreement, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (d) respond to user support requests, or (e) protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
  • By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

Really going to advise your law firm to take these kind of risks? I can tell you that I haven't talked to many, if any, lawyers who would agree to those terms if we used them in a LexBlog agreement.

But Hey, it's free. ;)

Don't get left behind, get your own blog

Lexblog

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Dan Harris - June 13, 2008 1:13 AM

Another reason: China just blocked blogger, which means if you have a blogspot blog, you cannot post to it from within China.

Graham Jones - Internet Psychologist - June 18, 2008 5:54 AM

It is easy to avoid the restrictions imposed by Blogger yet still benefit from the software's ease of use etc. All you need to do is to use the Advanced Options when setting up a new blog. In other words, don't follow the "orange arrow" for setting up a blog. Instead, use the advanced options and you can then host the Blogger blog on your own domain at your own web hosting company, or on your own servers.

I have explained how to do this in a couple of videos at http://www.changingblogger.com

Remind Myself - October 2, 2008 8:42 AM

Recently an insurance company nearly wind up....

A bank is nearly bankrupt......


Who fault?


The top management of the Public listed company ( belong to "public" ) salary should be tied a portion of it to the shares price ( IPO or ave 5 years ).... so when the shares price drop, it don't just penalise the investors, but those who don't take care of the company.....If this rule is pass on, without any need of further regulation, all industries ( as long as it is public listed ) will be self regulated......


Sign a petition to your favourite president candidate, congress member again and ask for their views to comment on this, and what regulations they are going to raise for implementation.....If you agree on my point, please share with many people as possible....


http://remindmyselfinstock.blogspot.com/

Astralis - April 19, 2009 9:35 AM

You can use your own domain name with Blogger and that takes care of most problems. You can even host the files on your own server and eliminate the IP blocking by countries such as China or Iran. Most people don't need their law blog in China or Iran anyhow.

Maxim - October 29, 2009 4:41 AM

Такой большой коментарий написал-отправил а он не отправился..и не сохранился..короче спасибо хотел сказать :)

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