As more and more of us put our neck out there by putting our information and documents on the Internet, it becomes more of an issue that you simply down OWN your own work anymore. We have Scoble’s recent banning from Facebook (he has since been reinstated). And today, I got banned from Scribd.com.

Scribd.com is an online document storage site with a social media component. I thought it might be an interesting site to try, so I uploaded a couple of documents a few days ago. One was an article entitled “How To Make a Powerful Blog Post”. It was geared toward webmasters. The other was a take-out from one of our recent weekly rants from our PCMech weekly newsletter. Well, this morning, I get the following from Scribd.com:

Dear pcmech,
One or more of your public documents has been repeatedly flagged as an advertisement by the Scribd community. It is against the Scribd terms of service to upload public advertisements, and because you have persisted in doing so, your account has been terminated and your IP address has been blocked. If you believe this termination to be in error and wish to have public access reinstated, please email us at support@scribd.com.

I was sent this message by Snowmaker, another Scribd.com user and a member of their staff apparently.

There was no email asking me about it from Scribd. I doubt this Snowmaker guy even looked at the documents. Why? Because neither of them was spam. The article on blogging was submitted by me to an INTERNET MAGAZINE to be published! Do you think a magazine is going to publish spam? The other was a rant published in our newsletter. For any of you who get our weekly newsletter, you know that the weekly rant is not spam. Its just an editorial.

Both of these documents did contains links to PCMech, and the blogging one probably linked to Webbyonline. Basically, very short little “about the author” stints at the bottom. Is this what qualifies as spam now?

In the meantime, you can surf around Scribd.com and find numerous examples of documents that are ACTUALLY spam. I have found “free ebooks” on this site for various “making money online” schemes.

So, this, of course, begs the question: Is your content safe?

Robert Scoble gets his entire social network unplugged by Facebook. On a much lighter scale, I get banned from Scribd.com. Many people today (including me) are making routine use of web-based services. We don’t own the servers, and many of these sites have terms of service that likely clearly state who really owns the content you put up on their servers.

It would be nice to know that real PEOPLE actually check these things before deciding you’re violating terms of service. The way the email from Scribd.com was written, I am to assume that I was banned because of the Scribd community. That is mob rule. And without somebody actually checking the validity, it risks making mistakes like this one. And as for the “you persisted in doing so” thing – please! – I uploaded TWO documents. Both within 5 minutes of each other because I was playing around with the service.

It is clear to me the staff at Scribd.com is inept at best.

If you are putting any documents on Scribd.com, I guess be sure you don’t put any URLs to your own website in there. These idiots think that is spam.

Update 1/13/08

This morning, I got this in my email in response to my inquiry on why exactly they banned my account:

Due to the rampant abuse of Scribd’s free services by Internet marketers, we employ a zero-tolerance policy for spam, advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO) on Scribd. We have ascertained that one or more of your documents fall into one of these categories, and under the policy we have permanently blocked your account. We will not make exceptions for any misunderstanding or ignorance of Scribd’s Terms of Service, for “non-profit services,” for the redistribution of advertising found in “free e-books” and elsewhere, for “inadvertent uploading,” or for other “mistakes.” There have been well over a thousand of these “mistakes” in the past month alone, and each one one puts our search engine rankings, our partnerships, and our long-term existence, in jeopardy.

We regret this course of action, especially if you’ve been the recipient of bad advice. It’s important to be acutely aware of all Terms of Service that you agree to.

Scribd does not provide backups or download access for documents uploaded before an account is blocked.

So basically, he’s telling me this is MY mistake and “tough luck”. At this point, I wouldn’t upload anything to this service. They’d probably label granny’s casserole recipe as an attempt to spam.