Last week I was browsing Technorati to see which blogs had recently linked to one of my own, when I saw something familiar: a copy of one of my articles on a different web site.

Sometimes it’s just a long quote, used either for another site’s commentary, or to link back, and I’ve no problem with this usage.

The main issue is with sites that scrape content and publish it on their own AdSense-riddled layouts in the hope of making some cash from other people’s work.

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Bloggers, Webloggers, Web 2.0 users (or whatever you call them) are celebrating the life of one man who has impacted the United States more than many of the nation’s leaders before and after his lifetime.
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FeedBurner has always been a nifty tool for bloggers and podcasters, particularly with tracking metrics for RSS feeds. For one, the service standardizes your XML feed such that it’s compliant with RSS 2.0 specs (and hence readable by most feed readers and other applications). For podcasters, FeedBurner also provides an easy way to incorporate added information, which is especially useful if your subscribers subscribe via iTunes.

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As the new year dawns in the Wonderful World of Science Blogs, we are treated to some compilations that should satisfy the biggest thirst for knowledge of things sciency. Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence collects some interesting reports in Blogging the Brain which includes The Top 5 Robots of 2006 for all those I, Robot fans and aspiring Stepford husbands out there.

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In a peculiar play on the term “Do No Evil”, it looks as though documents seized in raids in Iraq last week showed terrorists are using print outs of Google Earth to plan their attacks on British troops. No, they’re not just images of buildings and parking lots of publicly accessible areas, but rather satellite imagery of tents, toileting areas, and where trucks and Land Rovers were parked.

Yikes.

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So, late last week you may have heard about international football star and metrosexual David Beckham signing a reported $250 million dollar deal with the LA Galaxy to play in North America. What you may not have heard is how the signing sparked a cybersquatting bonanza.

As reported by the Sunday Herald, within minutes of the announcement being made, there was a flurry of activity in domain registration leading to hundreds of permutations of “David Beckham” and “LA Galaxy”, including, of course, purposely mispelled permutations as well.

The surprising thing, of course, is how neither LA Galaxy, nor David Beckham, had the foresight to secure a few domains for themselves:

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Well, it looks like yet another pay per post service is jumping into the fray, offering to pay bloggers for their posts. SponsoredReviews.com was publicly announced as a service for both bloggers and advertisers by Jarrod Hunt, head honcho at 360 Enterprise Inc., the company behind SponsoredReviews.

While SponsoredReviews is so far closed at this pre-release stage (although their blog states that an open beta is coming soon), it remains to be seen exactly what the gritty details are. And its becoming a crowded field, what with the pay-per-post table occupied by PayPerPost.com, Reviewme.com, and Creamaid.com, so far.

An examination of their FAQ, their blog, and their about page, doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of details except for two seemingly unimportant things, which might put a new spin on the issue of blogging ethics and paid blog postings.
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