Blogging in Germany: Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag

February 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

PG icon - ©Can Stock Photo Inc. / barneybooglesIt’s quite amazing now to think that this post almost didn’t get written, and it’s all down to something called the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag, or “JMStV” for short.  Another crazy piece of German legislation that, thankfully, didn’t quite make it into law.  Well, not yet at least.

Had it done so, you might well have seen a blank page here by now.  Indeed, it might have meant the end of most blogs in Germany.

But how can a law be that powerful, without banning blogs completely? [Read more…]

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Blogging in Germany: The Impressum

February 24, 2011 By 1 Comment

Paragraph Symbol - ©Can Stock Photo Inc. / froxxThere are many blogs on the internet where the blogger prefers to remain anonymous, at the very least he or she prefers not to tell the World exactly where they live.

For what ever reason that may be, they use an anonymizer service to register their domain, or rent themselves a post office box and use that for anything where they have to give a real address.

Considering Germany’s attitude to privacy and especially to services like Street View, you would think that it would be possible here as well, wouldn’t you?

Of course not. [Read more…]

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Blogging in Germany: Google Analytics and IP addresses

February 23, 2011 By 3 Comments

Bloggers in Germany generally have a hard time with all the regulations.  Over the next few days, I’m going to explain some of them and what they mean for us.

A graph - ©Can Stock Photo Inc. / pashaboAnyone in the blogging business will probably tell you that statistics are an important part of running a blog.  Not to the extent that you are checking them every hour, you understand.  But at the very least you need some decent figures on how many visitors you receive each month and how often each of them visits the site.

Getting more advanced, it is also good to know which posts were read the most, how the site was found, eg. in a search engine, and just generally trends that show whether the traffic to the site is going up or down.

Most providers in Germany offer this kind of service when you rent your webspace or server, but the quality of the statistics differs widely.

Anywhere else in the World, you would probably say “so what?” and install Google Analytics, a tool that offers you statistics about almost everything happening on your website.

But not in Germany.  At least, not unless you want to take a risk. [Read more…]

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