WordCamp 2009 is officially in the books. With two and a half days of some of the best community, speakers and information, it was an incredible event. Over the course of the weekend, I saw some of the best blogging-related presentations, met many of the most wonderful people in the blogging world and observed some of the worst bowling ever witnessed by man (though most of that was my own).

The event was a smashing success with over 300 attendees. Organized by John Pozadzides and sponsored prominently by his company, Woopra, it was, according to those in attendance, the second-largest WordCamp in the world.

But while the best part of these WordCamps is always the community and getting to meet all of the people who share your passion, there were also a slew of great speakers, 16 in total, plus a panel discussion. Even for a veteran blogger, there was a great deal to learn.

So, as I try to digest and take in everything I saw and learned at WordCamp Dallas, a more complete recap is forthcoming on my site, here are five things I’m holding onto dearly as WordCamp Dallas closes up for the year (in no particular order).

6. Using Social Media

Giovanni Gallucci gave a very passionate and interesting talk about ways to use social media to help your site gain traction both with readers and with the search engines. Though I may not have agreed with all of his “blue hat” tactics (tactics that combine black hat and white hat elements) I definitely learned a great deal about how you can use your accounts on other sites to promote your main offering and how to target your content to the keywords that are most valuable to your readers.

It was an incredibly informative talk that has me thinking of ways to alter my site and my presence elsewhere.

5. WordPress Custom Fields

Randy Hoyt gave an incredible talk about using WordPress’ custom fields in your blog posts. As the user of a magazine-style template for my main site, I use these custom fields every day but never really thought about all of the things that they could do.

Hoyt’s talk got me really thinking about new ways I can use custom fields to control the layout of my site including, possibly, the addition of subheads, a better review system and perhaps most importantly, use custom fields to help me organize the front page of my site so I do not have to use my categories.

Hoyt also talked a great deal about plugins that can help manage these custom fields and I will probably be very busy over the next week playing with them.

4. Categories and Tags

Speaking of categories and tags. Lorelle VanFossen gave a great Star-Trek themed talk about the proper use of categories and tags on your site. Like most bloggers, I didn’t have much of a plan when I started categorizing and then tagging posts and it shows.

Lorelle’s talk showed everyone how to cut through that clutter and now that, thanks to Randy Hoyt’s talk, I should be free of the category ball and chain as a site layout tool, I should be able to at least completely redo my categories to provide much better organization, usability and SEO to the site, both for the search engines and my visitors.

I can’t wait.

3. Design and Layout

In one of the more entertaining talks, Liz Strauss “ripped apart” John Pozadzides’ blog layout while he worked in his admin panel to try and fix the layout more to her (and the audience’s) liking.

But as entertaining as the spectacle was, it came with it several bits of advice and ideas as only Liz can provide them including remembering why you are blogging and putting that information front and center. This, in turn, got me to take a new look at my blog layout and, as a result, I’m almost certainly going to be making some changes.

Liz Strauss is simply one of those people that, when you think you’ve almost learned everything she has to offer, you realize you’ve barely scratched the surface.

2. WordPress as a CMS

WordPress is widely known as a blogging platform but it really is much more powerful than that. Through both native functionality and some plugins, you can use WordPress as a content management system, in short, using WordPress to manage a non-blog Web site or a very complicated site where a blog is just a part of the picture.

This was the thrust of Scott Clark’s talk (and musical number) as he discussed both the general usefulness of WordPress and highlighted several plugins that expand this capability, including Pods, one he helped create.

Combined with Randy Hoyt’s talk about custom fields, the power and flexibility of WordPress really began to click. Even better though, his talk is already available on Vimeo (the others will soon be available on WordPress.tv)

1. Multimedia, Multimedia, Multimedia

It was the theme of WordCamp Dallas in many ways. Dave Moyer, David Curlee and Cali Lewis all gave talks that dealt with, in some way, adding multimedia to your blog and the importance thereof.

Clearly this is a big part of the future direction of blogging and it is going to be important for all bloggers to at least try their hand at multimedia content from time to time. Now is the time to begin learning the technology involved in creating podcasts and videos as well as to begin honing those skills. Also, As David Curlee pointed out, the technology is getting much cheaper and much easier to use.

Bottom Line

On top of these presentations, there were many other great speakers including DB Ferguson, who discussed the steps to becoming an authority blogger, Matthew “Spamboy” McGarity talked about how to install WordPress on your home computer for testing purposes and Mark “Rizzin” Hopkins (who was livestreaming last year’s event for Mashable) gave a talk about moving beyond Adsense on your blog to earn more money (very useful for those who run ads on their site).

I was also speaking at the event, in a talk dealing with finding free and legal content for your blog. Douglas Hanna, who works for Automattic, gave a talk about the WordPress showcase and, most important of all Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic was there to talk about the state of WordPress.

All in all, there was an incredible amount to learn and glean from this even and this post barely scratches the surface of what all went down. It was an incredible weekend in Dallas and I am already looking forward to Wordcamp in 2010.

If you weren’t able to attend live or catch the livestream on GeekBrief.tv, don’t worry, the videos from the presentations will be posted on WordPress.tv shortly. So stay tuned.

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However, this doesn’t mean that a blogger can get away with being a technical dunce. Though getting words on the Internet is pretty simple, building and growing a blog does require one to know a bit more than how to flip on a PC. Social networking sites make it easy to get online, but blogging, especially over the long haul, takes something more.

So what are those things that every blogger should know? There are many, definitely more than what is on this list, but here are five things every would-be blogger should know before, or at least shortly after, getting started.

1. The Basics of the Web

The Internet is a pretty amazing thing. Data travels all across the world on the back of a system that, when explained correctly, seems like it should never work. It’s both breathtakingly complicated and brilliantly simple at the same time.

Though a blogger doesn’t need to understand every technical detail about how the Web does its thing, a basic understanding of how a browser goes from a “.com” and then loads a site is probably a good idea. This should include at least a basic understanding of how domains are registered, how DNS works and how data gets from A to B on the Web.

One doesn’t need to know how the TCP handshake works, but a fundamental understanding of the “big picture” when it comes to Web infrastructure is pretty useful.

Why it is Important

Even a basic understanding of the workings of the Web can help you be a better blogger. First, if you go to set up your own hosting, you’re going to need some of that understanding to make everything work and understand the process of setting up your own domain.

However, even if you host with a free site, it can help you understand site outages, how to speed up your blog and why visitors often have very different experiences based upon their location.

Where to Learn It

How Stuff Works has a very thorough article about the basics of the Web, including DNS, IP addresses and more.

2. How a Web Server Works

Similar to the Web itself, a server is a thing of beauty. How a machine receives contact from the Web at large, processes the data and then returns a response is both a simple and an amazing thing. On most blogs this process involves the use of several different programs, operating in several different layers and working in tandem to pull together the information requested and present it in a human-readable format.

To make matters even more complicated, one physical server can, and often does, run hundreds, even thousands of different Web sites. It is even common for one physical machine to house several different virtual machines within it.

Though one doesn’t have to be ready to manage their own server to run a blog, understanding the basics of how it works can prove infinitely useful.

Why it is Important

First and foremost, a basic understanding of a server will help you set up your blog so that it works with the hardware, not against it. It helps you understand how WP Super Cache can improve the performance of a site and what you can do to keep your site running quickly.

However, perhaps more importantly, it helps you understand communications from your host. Knowing the basics of how a server works will help you better grasp what went wrong when your site goes down, how bad it is and also enable you to ask smarter questions of your support team.

Where to Learn It

Nebraska Wesleyan University has a simple, effective and visual guide to how a server processes a request.

3. Basic HTML (And Maybe PHP)

If you’re used to using nothing but a word processor, HTML code can look very intimidating as it comes with strange symbols and syntax that can look like an alien language. Many understandably confuse markup language for programming language and do everything they can to avoid even looking at it. Some, thanks to WYSIWYG editors, can avoid it for a very long time.

Fortunately though, HTML is not nearly as complicated as it looks at first glance and most of the code one would need for blogging is very basic. However, not knowing it can be very costly.

Why it is Important

Though WYSIWYG editors are much better now than they were just a few years ago, they are still not perfect. At some point, if you are going to get something to look how you want it to, you’re going to need to get your hands dirty at least a little bit.

Also, if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress installation you may want to have at least enough understanding of PHP so that you aren’t intimidated if you have to make a few changes, as it is a part of updating and customizing many themes.

However, even if you don’t customize your theme at all, the first time your table isn’t aligned exactly right or the text doesn’t wrap correctly around an image correctly, you’re going to want to have that basic knowledge to fall back on.

Where to Learn It

W3Schools has a great basic overview of HTML and is also a great reference for those who know (but sometimes forget). Likewise, Tizag has a good overview of PHP.

4. Image Compression/Sizing

Image compression is something of a black art and even those who are veterans will argue over the finer points about it. What file type to use (GIF, JPG or PNG), how much to compress and the size of an image are often areas of intense debate among the Web-savvy.

However, there are still some things one should never do as they can cause problems and knowing how to avoid the pitfalls is critical when running a blog.

Why it is Important

If you don’t compress your images correctly, you can wind up with a Web page that is many times the size it should be. A logo that is 100 K will slow even broadband visitors down. Couple that with a poorly-compressed background and some heavy inline images and your visitors may be leaving before reading a single word.

It is important to keep your site as lean as practical and a big part of that is keeping your images down to a reasonable size.

Where to Learn It

JISC has a good guide on what image type to choose. However, every application has a different set of instructions for image compression, you should look up a guide for your preferred image editor. MyJanee.com has a great guide for creating Web-friendly images in Photoshop and the official Gimp documents have a similar one for the Gimp image editor.

5. Online Security

The Web can be a very dangerous place and keeping yourself safe on it is vitally important for everyone, not just bloggers.

Online security can involve everything from not posting your personal information to making sure your operating system is patched. It is about keeping you, your data and the information of those close to you as safe as reasonably possible.

Though there is no way one can be completely secure on the Web, there are definitely things one can do to ensure that they are as protected as possible.

Why it is Important

Online security is important for everyone, whether they blog or not. However, bloggers face additional challenges in this area. Having a site not only gives attackers a new target, but also new openings. Blogging systems can be hacked, servers can be broken into and sites can be shut down.

Online security for bloggers includes everything from keeping software up to date, backing up data, not putting critical information your server and choosing good passwords. It’s a wide swath of items to cover but all of it is vitally important.

Where to Learn It

Realistically, there is too much to learn in just one guide but CCL has a good overview of the basics of computer security, much of it which applies to bloggers.

Bottom Line

In the end, you don’t have to be a geek in order to run a blog, but a little bit of technical knowledge will go a very long way. A basic understanding of some critical technology will help make you a better blogger and make it easier for you to grow your site and expand on the Web.

If you don’t have this knowledge now, taking the time to develop a basic understanding will serve you well, especially in the long run.

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First, and most memorable, Facebook began offering usernames, creating a landrush, and second, Twitter began verifying user accounts.

But what if the username you wanted is no longer available? What if your name, your business name or some other element of your identity is gone. This happened to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and, most likely thousands of others.
If this happened to you, the good news is that you may have rights you can protect, especially if you are facing an obvious namesquatter, but it may be very difficult enforcing those rights on either site due to the nature of the law and the nature of Facebook and Twitter as companies.

Still, it may be worth a shot.

The Basics of the Law

The law has to be applied on a very case-by-case basis in this situation. However, if you use your name as part of your business, especially if it is a name that you created, and someone takes the username with the sole intent of preventing you from having it, you likely have recourse that you can take.

In short, if you use a name, logo or slogan in conjunction with your business, and it is unique to you, you likely enjoy some trademark protection in the name, no need to register. If someone is using your trademark to cause confusion in the marketplace, which is what a namesquatter does, it is likely a form of trademark infringement.

That being said, if someone has legitimate use for a name, they are not squatting on it. For example, on Facebook, I am not “Jonathan Bailey” but instead I am “plagiarismtoday”. The reason being there are many other Jonathan Bailey’s and one of them got the name first. However, Plagiarism Today is the name of my site and my business, giving me much more protection (and much more originality).
To make matters worse when dealing with namesquatting, unlike copyright law, there is no notice-and-takedown system for dealing with trademark infringement. There is a resolution system for dealing with trademark infringing domain names, but it does not apply to either Facebook or Twitter.

Fortunately, both sites do provide systems for filing notices with them and attempting to get the matter resolved. However, there is no guarantee of success.

Facebook

Facebook provides a non-copyright IP infringement form that one would likely use for this purpose. It requires users to fill out their name and information, a list of the rights they allege were infringed, where the URLs appear and how they are infringing.

In addition to dealing with namesquatters from the recent Facebook land rush, this form also is for dealing with other common trademark issues including “official” fan sites and fake Facebook accounts.

Definitely keep this URL handy if you or your company may be dealing with non-copyright intellectual property issues on Facebook.

As of yet though, I have not heard any reports on how well Facebook responds to and processes these requests and we likely won’t have much of an idea until later this week.

Twitter

Twitter has had a very long-standing policy for dealing with name squatting, something that does not change with the recent verified accounts

According to Twitter, the easiest way to report a name squatter is by sending a reply to either @spam or @xstalashoe and be sure to include the word “squatter” in your tweet. However, as those who have worked with Twitter know, you’ll likely have better luck following their trademark policy (if applicable) and either filling out their support form or, even better, using the email address they list on the policy.

For reasons unclear to me, several people, including one law firm, have reported better and faster responses by using their email account than via the form.

Bottom Line

In the end, if you were a victim during the recent Facebook land rush or didn’t get the Twitter username best for your business and have a legitimate claim to your name, you may still be able to get it.

However, it is important to remember, and worth repeating, that your rights to the name only apply if the other person doesn’t have a legitimate claim. Delta Faucets and Delta Airlines could both use the name “Delta” for Facebook legitimately as could any company with Delta in the name.

Separating the legitimate name claims from the false ones will be a tough job for Facebook and Twitter over the coming months and even years.

As social networking and social news become more and more important parts of business strategies, the issue of naming rights is only going to grow. It seems very likely that this is going to be an area where we see a great increase of litigation in the coming years, and likely a very sticky point for both trademark holders and Web sites that host them for quite some time to come.

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However, if those images are copied one might never know where they came from. Though watermarking images is standard practice for many who blog, the iPhone has not had the ability to do that. This has forced photographers to either do without such marks or edit their photos on a computer first.

However, a new application, PhotoMarkr (iTunes URL), by Imangi Studios, changes that. PhotoMarkr adds a very simple and basic watermarking app to the iPhone. Images sent directly from the device can have the same kind of professional marks that one might get from a traditional photo editing application.

However, the app does seem to have its share of hiccups, but at a price point of 99 cents, they may well be forgivable.

How it Works

When you first open up PhotoMarkr, you are presented with a very short options screen that lets you turn the watermark text on or off, edit the text of the copyright notice (the app provides a dedicated button to create the “©” symbol since the iPhone keyboard does not have it) and enable the watermark image.

The result of this is that you can add any text or image you want to your photos as an overlay. For example, you could import your site’s logo onto the device and use that as your watermark or simply write a brief copyright statement. You could also add text to the image to indicate a Creative Commons license or simply point back to your site URL.

Once you’ve set your options, you then are given the choice of either taking a new photo or editing an existing one. Once you have your image, you can then edit the watermark.

There, using the touch controls, you can rotate, resize and reposition the watermark to your liking. You can also adjust the transparency or, if needed, go back to the options and change the text. However, the default placement, the lower left hand corner, seems to work well for most images.

Once that is done, Photomarkr saves the image to your regular camera roll, where you can email it, save it or use it with other apps.

Good and Bad

Overall, the watermarking system is surprisingly powerful and flexible. Despite the limitations of the iPhone, the system actually has more features than many desktop ones.

For the most part, Photomarkr is very intuitive to use and, though documentation is a bit thin (there doesn’t even appear to be an official page other than the blog post linked above), it is easy to figure out the ins and outs of the application. For the most part, it does one thing and does it rather well.

The biggest issue I had with the app was that the feature that lets you take a new photo did not seem to work consistently. Many times I took a photo using the application only to have it crash after I pressed the “Use Photo” button. However, those problems were intermittent and it is very hard to track down what caused those crashes.

That being said, the feature that lets you import an image from your photo roll worked like a charm every time and produced some impressive results. Even using image-based watermarks, the application resizes, rotates and adjusted the transparency very smoothly.

Though it would be much better if the “Take Picture” feature worked 100% of the time, as it is the ideal way to use the application because it would streamline the workflow, it’s not there yet.

Despite this, if one has any reason to want to watermark their iPhone images before putting them on the Web, this tool is still far and away the best answer and, at just 99 cents, is well worth the price.

Bottom Line

Ideally, I think it would be better to see this functionality integrated into other apps. For example, if the Facebook application would watermark images before uploading to that service. This would keep the entire image editing process down to one application, rather than having to switch between Photomarkr and and whatever app you wish to use to upload the image.

Is Photomarkr an ideal solution? No. Is it a perfect application? No. But is it a good app and one that is well worth its 99 cents price point? Absolutely.

Though I am hoping it is either replaced or drastically improved quickly, Photomarkr has some very compelling features and it shows how useful the iPhone can be for this kind of image editing. Hopefully others, including the developers, can take this idea and expand upon it.

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However Findlaw, a legal information site and attorney directory that is targeted at consumers, has decided to change that by announcing the opening of its new blog index, which includes nine different blogs by its own editors and authors, all of which are targeted at consumers and not attorneys.

Though many of these blogs have been going on for some time on separate corners of the mammoth site, this is the first time that they have been brought together for one easy-to-navigate resource.

What’s In the Network

The network has three different categories of blogs. The first is General Interest, which deals with a variety of “day to day” legal issues including criminal, family and consumer law. The second is Legal News, which covers a variety of legal decisions and changes to the law. Finally, there is Business of Law, which covers the law as it deals with business, marketing and technology.

Within those categories is fourteen different blogs on a variety of topics including the following:

1. Common Law: A blog about the law as it pertains to consumer protection.
2. Injured: A blog that deals with personal injury and tort law.
3. Legal Grounds: A more humorous blog dealing with “odd” legal stories.
4. Courtside: A blog that covers breaking legal news.
5. Technolgoist: A blog that covers the law as it pertains to technology.

All of the blogs on this index are written by Findlaw’s authors and editors, making them very solid resources in their categories. Best of all though, they are each targeted at consumers and end users, not at other attorneys. They are all very easy to read, avoid using excessive legal terminology and should be approachable by just about anyone.

If you’re interested in law, even casually, you should probably check out the site and see what it has to offer.

Minor Gripes

As great as the actual blogs are in the network, there doesn’t seem to be much consistency between the blogs themselves. For example, some of the blogs have partial RSS feeds, others have full ones, some use FeedBurner to manage their feed, others do not. The blogs even have very different posting schedules with some being almost daily and others being only a few times per month.

Also, if you visit the sites themselves, they have very different layouts and looks, even though they are all on the Findlaw network in some capacity.

If all of these sites were not links on this one page, it would have been easy to mistake them very sites under different editorial direction. This makes them feel less like a network and more like a a semi-random grouping of blogs.

The other criticism I would have is that the feeds themselves tend to be fairly bland. The ones I checked out, though very few used any images or visual items in their articles, making their feeds very lengthy, albeit interesting and useful, chunks of gray text.

Despite these issues, the blog network at Findlaw remains something of an oddity. A series of law-oriented blogs that are approachable by laypeople.

It may not be the first time that law blogs have been targeted at everyday people, but it is the first time I am aware of where an entire network of law blogs, under one company, has been as such.

Bottom Line

All in all, the Findlaw blogs are a great collection of blogs targeted at everyday Web users. Though the business blogs may still be over the heads of many, the general interest and legal news blogs should not be and they provide a great way to stay on top of legal news in your area of interest without having to pull out the legal dictionary.

These blogs are a great way for people with a passing interest in the law to keep on top of what is happening. Even if you don’t have any interest at all in the legal system, the Legal Grounds column will likely be a good, light-hearted blog to keep in your RSS reader.

If you haven’t subscribed to one or more of these blogs, seriously consider doing so. I’ve added both Legal Grounds and Technologist to my feed reader and could certainly see, for example, how readers of The Consumerist might want to also read Common Law.

It might be a daily dose of legal news, but it is not a bitter pill to swallow.

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As such, many will not be blogging today, but that does not mean it is always a full day off. Most, myself included, will be spending at least some time working on our sites, just not necessarily writing new content for it.

If that describes you, here are five things that you can do, other than actual blogging, to help your site and keep it going strong. Best of all, these are all, for the most part, short-term tasks you can pick up and drop off between other activities on a holiday.

Here’s 5 suggestions on how to spend your blogging holiday if you plan to spend at least a little bit of in front of your computer.

5. Catch up on Email

It happens to call of us. We intend to do a good job keeping up on our email but we inevitably get behind. Sometimes the best approach is to just take a holiday, when fewer people are online to read whatever you might post, and spend some of it answering email. This works out great because it is less likely the people you are replying to will be online, meaning they are less likely to respond instantly and that lets you get further ahead.

Email isn’t that much fun and can seem archaic in the era of Twitter, but it still is very important as not all ideas can be shared in 140 characters.

4. Work on Long-Term Projects

Everyone has a project or two that they are very excited about but don’t quite have the time to work on most days. Whether it is a series of posts requiring a lot of research, a new template or an altogether new site, it can be difficult finding even just an hour or two to contribute to an ongoing project.

A day off from blogging is an excellent time to do just this. It gives you a chance to play with an idea, do some research or even try out some new tools. Exploration and working on long-term projects can greatly help your site down the road.

3. Analyze Your Stats

Though most bloggers seem to at least glance at their stats from time to time, most don’t routinely dig deep and analyze what is going on. Now is a great chance to open up Google Analytics, take look at the search terms that are bringing the most traffic, see which posts are having the greatest impact and understand how your visitors are using your site.

This is an opportunity to spend a few minutes going past the “page views” and “visitor” tallies and read more about how and why people are visiting your site. This can be very helpful in determining future posts.

2. Work on Your Design

Everyone has things that they would like to change with their layout, but making design changes takes time. Even if it is just fixing a few broken links, any change beyond just reordering a few widgets, needs to be done with care, precision and testing. That takes planning, skill and, most importantly, time.

Off days and holidays are a great chance to do this, not only is the time more available, but with fewer people visiting your site you can turn of all of your caching programs and worry less about people seeing your mistakes. Limited server load, fewer eyeballs and some free time all combine to make these days the perfect time to make tweaks on your site or even try out a whole new template.

1. Take an Actual Day Off

This last one is something of a radical concept for many, myself included, but you can actually just take the day off. Spend the time recharging, brainstorming idly a bit or just enjoying life. Everyone needs to take a day off once in a while and sometimes a blogging holiday should be just that, a day away from the blog and even the Web altogether.

We all need time off to keep the creativity flowing and avoid burnout. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your site is to just step away for a little bit.

A day off may not be a vacation in Maui, but it can help all the same.

Bottom Line

In the end, days off can be just as productive as days where you are actively blogging. Whether you’re tackling a long-term project, working on a new design or even just doing nothing at all, it can help your site grow and become stronger.

We’re all human, so a little down time is needed to keep us all going. However, it’s easy to forget that as we plow through the day-to-day struggles of keeping up our sites.

When we lift that burden off of ourselves, even for just a day, we open up new possibilities and give ourselves a chance to both rest and to take care of items we’ve allowed to slide.

It’s a powerful opportunity and one that should not be overlooked.

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So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when you use a smartphone, such as an iPhone, that your mobile device becomes a real Twitter powerhouse, one capable of rivaling many desktop clients in terms of usability and features.

On the iPhone, two apps have emerged at the top of the pile, Twitterrific and Tweetie (though Twitterfon remains a highly-regarded free alternative). Both apps have their supporters and their detractors but both of them have turned into very powerful Twitter applications.

For the most part, the two applications mirror each other feature-to-feature, so, in order to compare them, we have to look a bit deeper at what distinguishes them. In the end, it is tough to say which app is the “best”, even though there are many people who one app will clearly fit their needs better.

The Similarities

Tweetie Screenshot

Both of the applications let you do most of your basic Twitter management functions. You can read your stream, check your mentions, read your messages, perform searches, follow users and post new tweets, including retweets and replies. Both also integrate with twitter images services such as Twitpic and Yfrog and can interact with your phone’s GPS to find other Twitter users near you.

They also have many of the same advanced features such as multiple themes amd interaction with Instapaper. Both also have full desktop clients available for OS X. In short, both of these applications can be the only app name you’ll need to know in Twitter clients, both on your phone and on your computer.

The bottom line, and most important thing in this review, is that both Tweetie and Twitterrific are very powerful Twitter clients out of the box. Though they lack the multi-column interface of Tweetdeck and other desktop clients, they can do almost anything their big brothers can.

The Differences

Twitterrific Screenshot

Right off the bat, Twitterrific has several key advantages over Tweetie, namely that there is a free, ad-supported version of the client available and it can manage multiple accounts (Note: Both can manage multiple accounts though Tweetie buries the function deep in their settings: Thanks to David and Thomas). These two things alone will make it the application of choice on the iPhone for many users.

However, the two applications have very different user interfaces. Tweetie, across the bottom, has buttons for your timeline, mentions, messages, favorites and “More”, which links to searches and various other tools. Twitterrific, on the other hand, has a timeline button but the other ones across the bottom are a new tweet button, which Tweetie keeps perpetually at the top, an asterisks button that gives you more information about a person or tweet (this button isn’t available until you select a tweet) and a filter button that makes available the replies, messages, favorites, etc.

Tweetie, for me, keeps my most commonly used functions closest by. For simple tasks such as checking to see if a new tweet generated anty replies or reading a DM you got an email about, Tweetie requires fewer key presses. Also, Tweetie seems much faster due in large part that you can set how many Tweets Tweetie downloads and can interact with the application even as it is downloading updates.

For example, if you are checking mentions, you can pull up Tweetie, press the reply button and wait for it to load the tweets, which usually happens right after the button is pressed. Twitterrific, on the other hand, “locks up” until the tweets are downloaded, all 100 of them in most cases, and then you can move your way to the replies page.

Tweetie also feels faster when uploading images to Twitpic or another image loading service, likely due to higher default compression, and feels quicker when posting a new tweet.

On a wifi connection, this a mountain out of a molehill, most people will not notice the difference. But on a cell connection, especially one that isn’t 3G, there is a very noticeable difference.

Another area that Tweetie excels is in the way it displays Tweets, always managing to get more information on the screen despite having bigger buttons. Where, in some cases, Twitterrific might only display four full tweets, Tweetie gets five or six, without sacrificing aesthetics or readability. This may seem like a small improvement, but is huge when trying to scroll through a long list of tweets. (Note: Twitterrific does allow users to set the font size and a smaller option does produce more tweets on the screen by a slim margin, but sacrifices the avatars.)

However, though Tweetie is more usable for most tasks, one area that is confusing is the settings panel. There, currently, is no way to adjust the settings within Tweetie, you have to exit the program and go to the “Settings” application in the iPhone itself to edit Tweetie’s options. Tweetie also doesn’t do a great job of explaining some of its options, though at least one of them is intended as a joke, namely “Popularity Enhancer”, the lack of documentation and clear explanations can be frustrating.

Still, in the end, it is a rather minor point since most people will set their options once and never come back to them, at least until they write a review of the application.

Bottom Line

Last week I had the opportunity live tweet a wedding from my iPhone and I switched back and forth between the two applications through out it. Tweetie simply worked out better. It was faster and more responsive, especially over the 3G network and it enabled me to get more tweets and more images off than Twitterrific.

Though Twitterrific has some great features, especially the customizable feature that lets you edit the way the program responds to taps, double taps and triple taps on the avatar, it just felt slightly slower than Twitterrific and that really hurt in a critical moment.

That being said, if you tweet mostly from a wifi connection, need multiple account functionality or really don’t feel like paying for a Twitter application, Twitterrific may be the best application for you. However, those that simply want the fastest, most efficient and most intuitive app, at any cost, will likely favor Tweetie.

In the end though, it is easy to see how one could disagree with me. I found Tweetie to be the easiest to use, but I also used Twitterrific second, which you find intuitive could be different and the speed issue, though important when live tweeting, isn’t a deal-breaker in most cases.

I would say give both a try but, since Tweetie doesn’t offer a free version, that isn’t practical. Instead, I say give Twitterrific a try and, if you find its shortcomings annoying, consider paying the few extra bucks for Tweetie. If you like it, consider spending the few bucks for Twitterrific Pro and getting rid of the ads.

Either way, you’ll have a great Twitter application on your phone.

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However, the decision did not last long. After less than three hours, Ghosh reactivated the full feeds after many of the site’s readers posted comments objecting to the change. He instead said he would experiment with RSS footer and reopen the full feed.

Still, Ghosh’s frustration is more than understandable. With countless spam blogs scraping content without permission, the temptation to deny them access is understandable. However, users overwhelmingly prefer full RSS feeds and denying access to spammers is almost impossible without hindering access by legitimate aggregators.

The good news is that there are alternatives to shortening your RSS feed, practical ways to protect your content without cutting off your readers.

5. Log Analysis

One of the most basic ways to find out if someone is misusing your RSS feed is to look at your log files and see where your images are appearing. With most log analysis applications, this is fairly trivial to do.

The basic premise is this, if you include images within your RSS feed, anyone that republishes it, with or without permission, is using them as well and, by seeing the unusual places they appear, you can figure out who is likely scraping your feed.

If you use this in conjunction with an RSS footer (see below) to add a small invisible image to your feed, you can actually track your RSS feed’s usage both by your subscribers and by any potential scrapers.

Though, by itself, this will do nothing to actual stop misuse of your feed, as part of an effective response strategy, it can enable you to locate and stop spammers before they have the chance to hurt you.

4. RSS Footer

This is the solution that Ghosh settled upon. Using the RSS Footer Plugin will add a link to your site or any other information you request to the footer of your feed. This information, should the feed be scraped, will appear on the scraper site.

Since you can make this footer anything you want, you could put a copyright warning, use it to license your feed under a Creative Commons License or just put a simple link back to your site. You could also insert a tracking image.

You can also achieve similar functionality through FeedBurner’s Feed Flare service, by editing your Blogger template or even by just hacking your WordPress RSS file.

3. CopyFeed

CopyFeed is a Swiss army knife of RSS management in WordPress. It allows you to add a wide variety of information to the feed, including the IP address of the person receiving it. From there, the plugin has the ability to blacklist unwanted users from accessing your feed, allowing you to “ban” spammers from seeing your feed while letting your visitors in.

All of this is in addition adding footers to the feed, fixing accidental truncation and many more features.

The only drawback to CopyFeed is some have reported issues with it in the latest version of WordPress. If you decide to use this plugin, do so with caution as it is also possible to ban legitimate RSS readers (including Google Reader). Be careful to research each ban before you put it into effect.

2. FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a very powerful feed management tool that provides some great feed modifications, including the ability to provide “Web Friendly” version of the feed, and powerful statistics tool. Though using it requires surrendering control of your feed to FeedBurner, something that likely makes it a poor deal for self-hosted bloggers, but bloggers on platforms such as Blogger and Typepad, where FeedBurner is easily integrated, will see a great deal of benefit.

One of the more powerful features of FeedBurner is the ability to view “Uncommon Uses”, which are uses of your feed that are outside the norm. As a service that manages hundreds of thousands of feeds with many millions of visitors, FeedBurner is easily able to detect uses of the feed outside of the norm.

Also, as mentioned above, FeedBurner allows users to manipulate the feed by adding custom footers and other “flares”, making the feed both easier to monitor and more powerful for end users.

1. FairShare

Though FairShare won’t do anything to prevent your content from being stolen, there is no more powerful or simple tool for tracking how your RSS-based content is used.

All you do is provide FairShare with the RSS feed of your site and provides you another feed for you to subscribe to that lists all of the matches the service finds. It uses matching technology usually only available to large corporations but provides it for free.

The only limitation to FairShare is that one has to do the investigating, sorting and follow up on the matches themselves. Also, FairShare is limited to only 50 matches per day. However, if one has more use than that, they probably need something more powerful regardless.

All in all, FairShare is a must-use tool for any blogger, even if they are only curious to see how their content is being used on the Web.

Bottom Line

In the end, there are situations where truncating the feed may be a good alternative, but those cases are extreme ones. Bloggers have many options at their disposal to track and protect their feed short of truncation that are well worth trying.

If these techniques do not work or are inadequate, then it may well be worth looking at taking drastic steps. However, doing so risks losing a large number of subscribers. The benefits always have to be weighed against the potential drawbacks.

There is no one right answer when it comes to full vs. short feeds, every blogger has to decide for themselves, but I do encourage bloggers to at least try alternatives before risking the backlash of their readers.

In the end, Ghosh made a smart decision and it is one that many bloggers could learn from.

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Yet, with time it grew, not just in terms of readership, but also in terms of the amount of time I spent on it. First becoming my primary site and then a full-time business. Currently, I spent about 60 hours a week on PT-related issues and am very stunned by what the site has become.

However, with this experience came a lot of lessons, many of them hard. Some things I did well from day one, many things I did not. Though I’ve been able to go back and fix many of my mistakes there are some I haven’t and probably never will.

Still, if I could do it all over again, there are many things I would change. Here’s a list of five of the more important decisions that, if given a second chance, I would not repeat.

5. The Domain Name

On one hand, plagiarismtoday.com is a decent enough domain name. It is two words, has a .com tld, describes what the site is about and is fairly easy to remember, but “plagiarism” is a nearly impossible word to spell for most people and it is even more difficult to type. When I tell people the domain face-to-face, I find myself always spelling it out because even those who know how to spell it are often unsure.

I have since bought other domains, including most commons misspellings of “plagiarism” and pointed them to my site, but by the time I realized my mistake I had gained a decent amount of PageRank and knew that the costs of moving it would outweigh the benefits.

I’m married to the name now and have grown quite fond of it, but I would almost certainly pick a different one if I were starting from scratch.

4. Category Hell

When I first started the site, I tried to map out the categories I would use in advance. It seemed like a good idea but the topic of the site changed (slowly) as feedback came in. I found myself pressed between expanding the category tree endlessly or filing stories in categories that didn’t really fit.

The categories on my site are a hopeless mess right now and there isn’t much that can be done about it. If I were starting today with tagging now integrated into WordPress (tagging was still in its infancy in 2005) I’d probably have a better shot at making sense of it all.

The problem actually compounded when I switched to the Mimbo theme, which bases the front page elements on the categories of the posts. Requiring me to alter the way I handle categories on the site an additional time.

If I could do this one over (or even if I could find the time to go back and edit all of the past posts) I would use a category system similar to the one here on the Blog Herald, with few categories based on the kinds of posts, and reserve tags for the topics.

3. Branding Changes

In the three years I’ve run the site I’ve had three major theme changes. While that isn’t unusually frequent, all three changes have involved rebranding, including new logos, color schemes, layouts and more.

The first one went relatively unnoticed since it was when the site was new, but the second change caused a great deal of headaches. Even though I warned of the change months in advance, posted a beta site for everyone to leave commons on and did several public tests/polls with the new layout, it still caused heartburn.

Every once in a while, even now, a year after the new layout went live, I still get letters from people who don’t recognize the new layout. This compounded by the fact that my site tends to be a resource one, a site people visit irregularly when they need it.

If I could do it over again, I’d make minor changes to the themes I have but avoid anything that involved a complete rebranding. Though I think the end result has been positive, the headache was completely avoidable with a solid brand and a good theme in the beginning.

2. FeedBurned

When I first started blogging, I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of RSS and was far too quick to hand it over to a third party service. Though FeedBurner has been a solid choice for the most part, it comes with a sacrifice in control over the feed that is very frustrating at times.

The lack of control was made up somewhat by the impressive statistics and other elements that made FeedBurner useful, but, since Google took over the company, the stats have been increasingly unreliable and as spam blogging has become more and more of an issue, FeedBurner has done less and less to help.

Though FeedBurner’s reasons are understandable, namely that they can’t provide support for this issue, all of the things FeedBurner can do to help protect a feed can be easily done by WordPress plugins and the plugins can do much more. Though FeedBurner is still a good deal for some sites, such as Blogger and WordPress.com sites, as a self-hosted blogger, I think I would have been wise to pass on it but am now too concerned about losing subscribers to the transition back to make the switch.

1. Off Topic

The first eight months of my site’s history, roughly, are a waste in terms of SEO. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the keywords that were sending people to my site and I didn’t write content that was well-targeted at it. As such, growth was slow for the first year or so, mostly word of mouth, and only one of the articles from the first year of my site ranks well in Google for any keyword of importance.

Though I’ve had two and a half years of (relatively) on target posts and better search engine targeting, I still have to wonder what I could have done with an extra year.

Bottom Line

Each of these mistakes were rookie errors. They came from inexperience with blogging but are all problems that have stuck with me in some way. Though I’ve made others, such as a disastrous permalink structure, I’ve been able to repair those without any major issues or long-term effect.

Still, if you’re thinking about starting a blog, these are five easily-avoided mistakes that could really cost you in the long haul.

Granted, we all make mistakes we wish we could take back (don’t get me started on some of my individual posts) but these are ones that can really linger and cause problems even years down the road.

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Those of us who use WordPress know well the power of its plugin system. WordPress plugins can help you do everything from spell WordPress correctly to adding a full-fledged message board.

However, everyone has a collection of Wordpress plugins that they feel are essential. They’re the plugins that, when you set up a new blog, you install right away, before even tinkering with the theme.

On that note, here’s my list of WordPress Plugins, other than those that come with the installation, that I instantly install and activate on every new version of WordPress before pushing it live.

5. WP Super Cache

This plugin really needs no introduction, everyone knows it and it is almost certainly on nearly every WordPress user’s “must-install” list.

On average days, WP Super Cache makes your site load faster and causes it to put less load on your server, on days of high traffic, it can actually keep your site from going down.

WP Super Cache is one of the few plugins that can literally save your site and save you money by allowing you to use cheaper hosting. That makes it a plugin that no WordPress user should do without for any length of time. The only real drawback to it is that it does cause compatibility problems with some other plugins, especially those that add dynamic elements, though most of them have been worked out.

4. Photo Dropper

Photo Dropper is a plugin I’ve talked about before on this site and one that is well worth repeating.

As every blogger knows, putting images in your post make them both more attractive and more likely to be read. The problem is that not ever blogger has the time, resources or knowledge to take high-quality images for their site. Fortunately though, there are many of artists and photographers willing to share their work under a Creative Commons License.

Photo Dropper makes it easy for bloggers to search for and embed CC-licensed images into their posts or pages. It works by adding a search box to the edit panel, which pulls up a list of appropriately-licensed images, and then lets you embed them into your post in a variety of sizes. Best of all, Photo Dropper adds the attribution line, making sure your use of the image is compliant with the terms of the license.

There is no easier way to get high-quality images for your WordPress blog.

3. Amazon S3 for WordPress or CDN Tools

If you use WP Super Cache on your site, then you’ve already done a great deal to ensure that your blog is speedy and your server is able to withstand the strain of a peak load. However, there is more that you can do.

By offloading your static files, including your JavaScript files, images, etc., to a content delivery network (CDN) you make it even faster for visitors by putting the bulk of the material visitors download on a server closer to them, no matter where they are in the world.

These networks work by duplicating the files in datacenters all over the world and letting visitors pull from the one closest to them, thus speeding up the download and taking still more load off of your main server.

The only major difference between the two plugins is that Amazon S3 uses the Amazon network, which includes CloudFront, and CDN Tools uses Mosso. Both are extremely cheap, usually cost just pennies a day for smaller sites, and will go to great lengths to speed your site up.

2. Widget Context

The addition of Widgets to WordPress not only made it easier to create sidebars on a site, but made it easier to instantly change the order as well as add and remove items. You can easily tinker and experiment with your sidebar(s) until you find a layout that works for you.

However, widgets, by default, come with a pretty serious limitation, they are always off or always on. While that may not be a problem for your navigation or your tag cloud, you might only want some widgets to show up on single post or only on pages.

Widget Context makes it easy to put your widgets into perspective and only have them show up on the pages that you want them to appear. This allows you to have you Digg buttons show up only on your posts and your list pages only show up on your index. This makes it easier to de-clutter your navigation bar, something that should make Lorelle very happy.

1. Post Templates

Most bloggers have a kind of post that they are going to repeat at least somewhat regularly. Whether it is a special series on the site, an entire category of posts that follow a pattern or even just a series of posts with the same categories and/or tags.

However, WordPress does not make it easy to repeat the same posts or to work from within some kind of template. This can make it easy to forget or omit critical parts of the post, or, even more annoying, require a lot of copy/paste work. Post Templates fixes that by letting users save a template of a post and then create a new post based up on it.

The beauty of post templates is that it can be as simple or as powerful as you need. You can use it to create a template for a recurring kind of post, complete with blanks that you fill in, or to just make sure that the categories and tags that go with a post are filled in when you create a new post. You can fill in as much or as little of the template as you want.

With post templates, you’ll never forget to categorize, tag, write a footer, format your headers or even add the “MORE” tag again. It makes it easy to set up a post once and then fill it in a thousand times into the future, being sure every one of them has all the needed parts.

Your Turn

Obviously, there are many more must-install plugins for WordPress, especially for podcasters and other kinds of bloggers with different needs. So what are some of yours?

So leave a comment with your list of must-have plugins to compare and build upon.

With so many great plugins out there, there are bound to be a few that we can’t live without. So what are yours?

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One of those lessons is a primer in mass media law. By publishing works to the Web, one is essentially performing much of the same function as newspapers and television stations did exclusively just a few decades ago. However, the laws that govern such publications are not taught in most high schools nor most colleges.

So what should a blogger know about the law before they put up their first post? There are many things, certainly more than what can be covered in this post, but here are twenty questions every every blogger should be able to answer.

A Few Notes

It is worth noting that all of the questions as well as their answers are based upon U.S. law. If you reside in a different country, obviously the rules are going to be different.

It is also worth noting that not all of these questions have “hard” answers as there is a lot of gray area. Still, it is important to understand where the hard lines are drawn and what is likely to put you on the darker side of the gray.

Copyright

1) What is the current term for copyrighted works?

The current copyright term, for works created since 1978, is the life of the author plus 70 years for works of personal authorship and 95 years for works of corporate authorship. (Source)

2) What are the rights associated with copyright ownership in a work?

Copyright includes the right to copy, distribute, prepare derivative works and perform/display works publicly (including via recording). (Source – PDF)

3) What are the four factors weighed in a fair use decision?

The four fair use factors are the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (Source)

4) Does a work have to display the © symbol to be copyright protected?

A work is considered protected when it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression. Though the use of the © symbol was a previous requirement of copyright ownership, it is no longer necessary for a work to be considered copyrighted. (Source)

5) What are the benefits of registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office?

Though registering with the USCO does not add any additional rights, it creates a public record of your work, enables you to sue for infringement and serves as prima facie evdience in the event of a court case. Furthermore, if you register before an infringement or within three months of publication, you can claim statutory damages. (Source)

6) Are you obligated to remove infringing works from your site if they were posted by others?

According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, sites that are operated within the U.S. are required to remove works alleged to be infringing by copyright holders so long as the copyright holder provides a full and complete DMCA notice. Failure to do so may result in the host being held liable for the infringement. (Source)

Defamation

7) What is the difference between slander and libel?

Slander is spoken defamation and libel is defamation that has been printed or is otherwise fixed. (Source)

8) What are the requirements for defamation?

A plaintiff in a defamation case must prove three elements including a publication to one other than the person defamed, a false statement of fact that is understood as being of and concerning the plaintiff and tending to harm the reputation of plaintiff. Finally, if the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice. (Source)

9) What are the defenses in a defamation lawsuit?

The main defense in a defamation case is “truth” but there are other defenses such as privilege, which covers statements in a courtroom among other limited exceptions, “opinion”, which means the statement was not one of truth but a personal view and “fair comment on a matter of public interest”, which deals primarily with ones views on a public matter. Note: Not all defenses are recognized in all locations. (Source)

10) Are you obligated to remove allegedly defamatory works posted by others from your site?

Though you are legally accountable for what you post to the Web, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents you from being held accountable or being forced to remove defamatory statements posted by others. (Source)

Privacy

11) What are the four types of privacy torts?

The four different privacy torts are appropriation, meaning the use of ones name or likeness for commercial gain without permission, intrusion, which is an invasion of one’s private space, public disclosure of private facts, and false light, which is similar to defamation but not necessarily wholly defamatory. (Source)

12) What is a “reasonable expectation of privacy?”

A reasonable expectation of privacy only exists if the person involved believes that they are in a private place and society as a whole would likely agree with them. (Source)

13) How does one become a “public figure”?

A public figure is anyone who is either a public official or otherwise interjects themselves into a public debate in hopes of altering the outcome. A person can also become an involuntary, but limited, public figure by being involved in an event of public importance. (Source)

14) It publication a requirement for all privacy torts?

Publication is not required in “intrusion” privacy torts as the violation occurs at the moment of intrusion. (Source)

15) Does the news value of a fact make it acceptable to publish private material?

If a fact is of public concern, meaning that reasonable members of the community could entertain a legitimate interest in it, then the publication of private material is generally acceptable. However, it is important to ensure that the fact itself is pertinent to the story itself. (Source)

Trademark

16) What is a trademark?

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. (Source)

17) What does a trademark protect?

A trademark is designed to prohibit competitors and others from using the mark of a company in a way that is likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. It does not prevent all use or copying of the mark. (Source)

18) Does a trademark have to be registered to be valid?

No. You can establish a trademark by using it with good faith in the marketplace. However, you are required to register your mark to use the “R” symbol. (Source)

19) Can a blogger use a logo of a company on their site to write about them?

Yes. So long as there is no confusion created or any implication of a relationship that does not exist, a blogger can use a logo from a company to talk about them. (Source)

20) Is it legal to use a company’s name in a blog title or URL?

Yes, so long as there is no confusion nor any attempt to to use the name and reputation of the trademark to further your own business. (Source)

Bottom Line

In the end, this isn’t a complete list by any stretch, but it is a beginning. If you’re a blogger and you aren’t comfortable with how you were able to answer these questions, especially if you blog about other people or use intellectual property from other sites, you might want to bone up.

To that end, the source links in this column point to some great legal resources for bloggers and the public at large. One each of the questions, there is plenty of additional information toi read through as this is just a brief overview of each one.

This is information that can keep you out of court and keep you on the right side of the verdict if you are sued. It’s worth spending some time to learn and understand.

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However, Digg was not the first recent site nor is it the largest site to widely use frames around other people’s sites. It is simply the first to get widespread attention from bloggers and Twitter users alike.

The comeback of framing didn’t start with Digg, but it may be kicked into high gear because of it. Still, it is worth taking a look at some of the other popular sites and services that use frames as part of their function, including more than a few familiar faces.

About.com

About.com is one of the few sites that used frames during the .com boom and both stayed alive through the crash and continued its framing throughout it.

Currently many of the outbound links on the site include a frame at the top. This frame seems to only be present on links that open up in the same window, as opposed to ones that open up in a new tab or browser window. The frame, which is 120 px high, includes a banner ad, a collection of five link ads, an About.com logo, a link to return to the story and a link to close the frame.

There is currently no indication that the site below has no affiliation with About.com or the advertisement.

[Sample Frame]

Facebook

Facebook is by far and away the largest single site to use framing in a widespread manner. Clicking on any link that takes you off the site will not only open the link up in a new window, but affix a small frame, approximately 45 px high, above the page.

The frame includes the image of the person who shared the link, their name and a preview of the status as well as a button to leave comments, another to share the page yourself and an “X” to close the frame.

The only use of the Facebook logo on the frame is a small “F” on the share button though, as with most frames, the URL does remain a facebook.com one and the URL’s favicon is still Facebook. .

[Sample Frame]

3. Ow.ly

Ow.ly is one of the many different URL shorteners that has become popular on Twitter over the years. Commonly used as part of HootSuite, However, Ow.ly doesn’t simply forward users onto their destination using a redirect, as most URL shorteners do, Ow,ly also puts the page in a 66 px high frame that includes a Ow.ly logo, a share button, a retweet function, a rating system and two links, one URL and one “X”, to close the frame.

Most Twitter users will likely be familiar with the Ow.ly frame as it is a pretty popular URL shortener, in part due to its stats tracking and integration with HootSuite.

[Sample Frame]

4. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon uses a frame to dispaly its stumble bar. The Stumble Bar is a 32 px high iframe that includes a “Stumble” button, with a small SU logo, a search box, a “Like” button, a button to share the page, another to “Like” it, a star rating system, a link to the reviews and a means to close it.

What makes the SU framing less egregious to some is that it works mostly within a closed ecosystem. The only links to SU frames are from within SU (save when you “share” a link using SU). That being said, the frame does remain in place when users click links away from the the pages on SU.

SU has been using this system since September and Kevin Rose has acknowledged the similarities between StumbleUpon and the DiggBar.

[Sample Frame]

5. Krumlr

Krumlr is a URL shortening services that melds social bookmarking with Twitter. However, as part of its service, some of the outgoing URLs are sometimes framed with a 57 px high iframe that has a large Krumlr logo, information about the person who created the URL, a retweet box with username/password log in for Twitter and a small “X” to close the frame.

However, this behavior seems to be turned off by default now on its shortened URLs and it seems to be largely outbound links from the site itself that still contain the iframe. However, this does mean users of the site will still routinely see the frame when they look at their own and other people’s links.

[Sample Frame]

Bottom Line

Digg may have stirred up a hornet’s nest when it began using its DiggBar, but it is neither the first, largest or most egregious user of frames. About.com has a much gaudier frame, Facebook is much larger in terms of traffic and many sites were using frames well before Digg.

Why Digg is the one that stirred up as much controversy is up for debate, but a lot of it seems to be that Webmasters had a good relationship with Digg, even proudly displaying Digg’s buttons, and there is a clear feeling of betrayal that Digg would take this step.

No matter what though, it is clear that the issue of framing is back and it won’t be going away any time soon. For those of us who have been developing sites for over a decade, it feels like 1996 all over again.

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However, a recent series of events has put Engle’s reputation at risk. According to a post in Engle’s blog, a stock art site has accused him of copyright infringement. They have presented him with an $18,000 bill, threatened him with a lawsuit and even contacted his previous clients, claiming that he was under investigation for infringement and that the work he did for them “may have been stolen from their client.”

The problem, according to Engle, is that he created the works himself and that he believes someone uploaded them to the stock photography site without his permission, and in violation of that site’s terms of service. But the company, feeling that the uploads were legitimate, are aggressively protecting what they see as their intellectual property, using their copyright attorney.

However, it doesn’t matter who is in the right in this case. For either side to clear their name, they are going to have to prove that the work is theirs. Unfortunately, as Engle admits, this will not be a simple matter as he “would never have thought to plan for something like this”. Though he has some incidental proof, namely upload dates to LogoPond and metadata in the files themselves, these are hardly ideal since Engle is not completely sure when the images were lifted.

Engle’s story highlights the need for writers, artists, photographers and other creators to be aware that there are a million ways their work could come into dispute and to prepare for such a situation in advance. The end goal is be in a situation where, no matter what happens to your work, you always have proof that you created it first.

U.S. Copyright Office

The first and most obvious place to register your work is with the U.S. Copyright Office. For citizens of the U.S., registering with the USCO is a requirement to sue for copyright infringement within the country and registering before the infringement (or within 3 months of publication) is a requirement to claim statutory damages.

However, registering with the USCO is not practical for every single work. Not only is it cost prohibitive, $35 for most registrations, there is often an extreme delay between when a registration is filed and confirmation is received. Even with the new electronic system, it can take many months for a registration to be complete. Fortunately though, registration certificates do bear the date received on them, which helps once the certificate is mailed out.

Still, it is unlikely a USCO registration would have helped much with Engle’s case. Though it might have helped with some of the legal aspects of it as it also provides prima facie evidence of ownership, given the delays and the fact anyone can file for a registration (during disputes, dual registrations are not uncommon) it would have likely provided little public proof in this case.

As such, this case illustrates the role non-repudiation services can have. Not as official copyright registrations, but as a stop gap to overcome some of the shortcomings of the USCO when it comes to the court of public opinion.

Non-Repudiation Services

Non-repudiation basically means that a party involved can not repudiate, or refute a claim. In this case, it involves bringing in a third party, other than the USCO, to validate a claim.

There are many non-repudiation services for copyright on the Web. Most are either free, such as MyFreeCopyright or SafeCreative, or only a few dollars per month, such as Numly.

The idea is is that, once you create a work, ideally even before you upload it to the Web, you upload it to one these services where it is fingerprinted, timestamped and stored in some capacity. Should someone else wish to dispute the claim, you would have a relatively impartial third party to verify when the work was created.

Online non-repudiation services provide a near-instant verification of ownership and, though they are not a substitute for a registration with the USCO, they can provide some form of proof in between registrations. Best of all, they can be used with almost any kind of work, including text, images, audio and video, and there are even WordPress plugins and RSS integration to make the process easier and faster.

Other Solutions

As the Engle case points out, there are many services on the Web that function very similarly to a non-repudiation service but do so simply as part of their service. For example, when you upload an image to Flickr, a video to YouTube, etc. the service creates a time stamp of when the work was uploaded.

The problem is that many of these services allow users to alter the time stamp of their work. This is often for legitimate reasons, such as to alter the order with which items are displayed, but this causes those timestamps to be questioned and makes them unreliable for such verification.

For a time stamp to be of any value, it can not be user-editable. This also eliminates timestamps on one’s own server, computer as well as in WordPress and other blogging platforms.

The good news though is that any service that doesn’t let users manipulate the time stamp can serve as a kind of ad-hoc non-repudiation service, making the process of providing verification of your work as simple as possible.

Bottom Line

Proving that a work is your own can be difficult on the Web. When the official system, at least in the U.S., takes weeks and even months to provide verification and is expensive for bloggers, one often has to find other methods to validate their ownership while they wait.

Considering that content moves across the Web in mere seconds, it is important to find ways to verify your work as your own before it falls into the wrong hands.

Fortunately for Engle, the evidence he has appears to be pretty good. If his work was actually lifted from his Logopond account, he should be in a good position as the site not only has a good date stamp, but also includes comments that range back to when most of the logos were uploaded, providing another layer of verification.

Though no one wants to be in Engle’s position, it is important to plan as if it could happen because, as his case illustrates, it can literally happen to anyone.

It is much better to plan in advance and have nothing happen than to be caught off guard with no means to protect yourself.

Update: There is now evidence that Engle may not have been telling the whole story regarding this dispute and there is evidence that Engle actually did use images from the site in question as part of his logos. It seems that much is being settled in this case.

Obviously, this doesn’t change the need for artists, to verify when they created a work. It does, however, show that these disputes can take many different forms.

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The service works by having users embed a line of JavaScript code into their site and it tracks when users select or copies text and images from the site itself. Tracer also adds an attribution line to every copy that includes a special link Tracer can track, thus letting you know when people visit your site from copied text.

The information provided by Tracer is only aggregate in nature, there is no information about what an individual user did with your content, and Tracer does nothing to prevent copying, thus it is not a DRM solution. All Tracer does is analyze how users interact with your content and which pages are the most “active”.

To do that, Tracer follows four metrics: page views, selections (meaning when someone selects objects), copies (actually copying the work) and generated traffic (clicks on links generated by Tracer).

After over three weeks of running the service, I’ve gotten some pretty good data on my site and the results more than surprised me. Here is what I learned.

Static Pages Receive More Copying

Tracer can not look at content on RSS feeds, it could only capture and analyze what visitors to my site were doing. Despite that, it became clear from reading the statistics that, once at my site, readers began to gravitate toward the static pages, especially those in my “Stop Internet Plagiarism” section.

Of the top five most copied URLs of my site, if you discount posts about Tracer where I encouraged readers to test it, four were static pages. Three were from the series mentioned above and one was the stock letter page, which makes sense as it is there solely for copying.

However, these pages tended to have a much lower level of traffic than other posts. This means that, though they weren’t the most visited URLs by far, they were head and shoulders above dynamic content in the level of user interaction.

Traffic Does Not Equal Copying

On a related note, traffic was not a good indicator of copying. The two variables seemed to be almost completely unrelated.

For example, a page about the limitations of copyright had less than one fifth the traffic of a page about how to find plagiarism but it still had nearly three times the number of copies and was dead even in the number of selections. Likewise, one of the more popular posts on my site received only one copy per 300 visitors while another, lesser-known, post had more than one copy per three views.

The difference between the posts was astounding and it became clear that traffic is a very poor indicator for how likely a post is to be copied.

Most Copies are Lengthy

Tracer distinguishes between long copies, over seven words in length, and short ones. However, the copying on my site was overwhelmingly long. No URL I checked had more than 50% short copies and most had an overwhelming percentage of copies be lengthy in nature.

This is important as it distinguishes between people who are copying to ensure they don’t misspell a name or some other element from those wanting to copy actual content. Though seven words is not a magical threshhold, most posts seemed to have an average copy length well over 100 words, in some cases over 200.

Though it is impossible to tell if this is plagiarism or copyright infringement, it does seem to point to copying beyond what is needed for a quote or a reference.

Little Traffic Gained

Despite having well over 100,000 words copied on my site over the three week trial and Tracer adding the attribution link to every copy (Note: Tracer doesn’t provide a total of the number copies made), I only received 20 visits from Tracer’s links. Though it is likely that many people stripped out Tracer’s links to create their own, it is still somewhat discouraging.

There is a good chance that many of these copies were for other uses, including ones offline, but it seems that only a very small percentage of cases actually kept the Tracer link intact, for whatever reason.

Caveats

Needless to say, this is far from a formal study as it only deals with my site. Plagiarism Today is likely not a great case study for many blogs as it favors lengthy posts (over 1000 words), few images and has a large amount of mission-critical static content. If your blog is radically different, so likely will be your copying.

Also, the system itself has limitations too, namely that it does not track RSS subscribers (where the bulk of my readers get the content) and it can’t track automated copying of any variety. This solely deals with how humans who visit my Web presence interact with my content.

Despite these limitations though, there is still a great deal to be gleaned from this information and it hints and ways that we may want to change our content tracking focus.

Changing Strategies

As someone who is interested in monitoring and tracking copying, both good and bad, this study has made me consider several different strategy changes for monitoring my content.

1. More Focus on Static Content: Though RSS scraping/spamming is still the biggest obstacle many bloggers will face, static content is clearly getting a great deal of attention to. Using Google Alerts or performing Copyscape searches for static pages will be more important moving forward.
2. Focus on Interaction: In determining which posts to watch closest, no longer will traffic be the determiner. This is where Tracer can really help, by providing an interaction metric that can be a better guide for this determination.
3. Ignoring Short Copies: Though I’ve long ignored short copies of text, including those up to about 100 words, due to issues with fair use, this reinforces that by showing that the average copy length is much higher. Clearly, if we’re only going to target the worst offenders, the goal is to aim higher than the average.

These are not drastic shifts in strategy by any stretch, but they can help track copies and study content use that otherwise might have slipped through the cracks.

Bottom Line

In the end, Tracer is an interesting service with some potentially valuable metrics. Though it has some serious limitations, it can help bloggers study how users interact with their content and, from that, both what content is most interesting and what content is most likely to be reused.

For that reason alone, Tracer has been fascinating for me to use these past three weeks. Though I’ve now changed to a version of the JavaScript that doesn’t forcibly add attribution (it seemed unkind to mess with user’s copy/paste functionality, especially for so little reward) I plan to keep it on the site a little while longer to see how else my content is used.

Obviously, if I find anything else out, I will report it here.

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There are strong believers in both camps and both sides have excellent points. As with most great debates, it comes down to a matter of personal choice but before you decide which camp you are in, it’s important to understand at least some of the arguments for and against using a stand alone blog editor application.

Whether it is a Firefox extension, such as Scribefire, a whole new application, such as Blogo, or something else altogether, there are drawbacks and benefits to doing your writing outside of your blog’s admin panel and it is best to be aware of them.

So here are five of the biggest arguments for and against using a new application to create your blog posts.

Why Use a Blog Editor

You don’t really have to look far for reasons to use a blog editor. Since the default admin panels remain the most popular editor on most systems, blog editors typically write their marketing material targeted at those users. As such, here are some of the most popular reasons programmers and users give for using a blog editor:

1. Work Offline: If your Web connection goes down or your site goes offline for a bit, you can’t work on your site any if you use the regular backend. However, blog editors work as well offline as on, letting you create a post and upload it when you have a connection again.
2. Better Media Handling: Though WordPress in particular offers a great set of media tools in its Web-based backend, blog editing apps often offer better handling of images, audio and video. Many connect directly with third party services, such as Flickr and YouTube, to speed up the process even more.
3. The Interface: Though your write page may be functional, it offers a limited set of tools and is not particularly attractive. Blog editors not only provide you more features in the interface, but also a more attractive one to boot.
4. Edit Multiple Blogs: If you work on several different sites, especially if they have different platforms, a blog editor can let you control all of them in one place and with one interface. This makes switching between them much faster.
5. Application-Specific Features: Some applications make it easier to profit from your blog by inserting custom advertising, others, like Blogo, have a full-screen mode for distraction-free writing. Many applications have a specific “hook” that goes above and beyond what you usually find in WordPress or even other desktop blogging apps.

In short, a blog editor gives you more power than their default counterparts but that doesn’t mean they are for everyone. As great as they can be, there are reasons to hesitate before you download, let alone pay for, a shiny new blog editing application.

Why to Avoid a Blog Editor

If all blog editors did was give users more power and features, then bloggers would be flocking to them and programmers would be flooding the market with new applications. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Though blog editors have their fans, most bloggers seem to prefer the regular write panel. Here’s five reasons why.

1. One Computer: A Web-based backend lets you blog from anywhere you have Web access. A blog editor lets you blog on the computer that you have it installed on. You need to either install it on every computer you plan to blog on, only use one computer for writing or learn to use the Web-based write panel as a backup.
2. The Default is Adequate: Though the traditional editors may not set the world on fire with their features, they do get the job done. Most bloggers don’t need any additional power so there’s no point learning a new system or paying any money.
3. Security Issues: In recent versions of WordPress, the XMLRPC function is turned off by default as a security precaution. This is the function needed to use an external blog editor. Though it can be trivially turned back on, it highlights the fact that you are opening up a potential hole into your blog by using such an application.
4. Learning Curve: Most bloggers are already comfortable with their admin panel meaning that using a blog editor is going to involve relearning simple tasks such as adding images and publishing. Though the curve usually isn’t steep, it’s enough to discourage many.
5. Other Backend Tasks: Even the best blog editor won’t let you manage your comments, plugins or other blogging elements, making it necessary to visit your admin panel anyway. Using an external editor is not a free pass to avoid ever logging into your site’s Web interface, just doing so for blogging.

The end result is that most bloggers don’t have much need or use for a Web interface and those that do often don’t get enough benefit to outweigh the concerns and limitations. Since most people have to use the admin panel at some point, there isn’t much to be gained.

Bottom Line

In the end, blog editing applications appeal most to bloggers with specific needs that are served by them. Most bloggers, who just want to write their posts and publish them, are adequately served by the Web based backend. Since most major browsers have spell check and are reasonably reliable (not to mention autosave in most blog applications), there isn’t much reason to fear using the default.

If you’re a blogger that is served well by a blogging app and gains something from it, then by all means continue to use it. However, if you don’t have some compelling reason to use a blog editor, it’s probably best not to do so. You need to be skilled at the default interface anyway, for emergencies when you are away from your machine, so there isn’t much to gain from learning two systems.

However, as I said before, it’s all a matter of opinion and I look forward to reading what others have to say in the comments.

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The problem is simple. As great as RSS feeds are, they don’t accept many of the advanced design and positioning techniques of a full Web page. RSS feeds don’t accept CSS or JavaScript (save some very limited exceptions for some readers) and instead rely on very basic HTML formatting to work.

This creates a problem though when designers create Web pages and posts for modern browsers only to watch them get butchered by stripped-down RSS readers.

So how can this be fixed? Here are some techniques to overcome a few of the most common problems when formatting for RSS feeds.

Images

Image formatting is one of the trickiest problems when designing for RSS feeds. This is especially true on WordPress blogs, where the RSS-friendly formatting was removed from the write panel, leaving only the CSS-based method.

As it sits right now, there are three ways you can format images for your RSS feed and have it look good.

1. Use the “Align” Element: The first potential solution is to add “Align=”left’/right” to your IMG tags. The problem, however, is two-fold. First, you’ll have to add a padding element to make it so that the text is not right up against the image. Second, the “Align” element is depreciated. Though it is still widely accepted, especially among RSS readers, it is not technically valid.
2. Use an Inline Style Element: Similar to using the “Align” element, you can use an inline “Style” element to set the image to float left or right. Though this is similar to using the Align element, Style is not depreciated. However, it is not widely accepted by RSS readers, not as widely as Align at least, and is still not a preferred method for most coders as it is redundant with the style sheet.
3. Place Images on Separate Paragraph: When writing the post, place the images on a separate paragraph from your text. Your CSS formatting should allow them to look right on your site but, when viewed in an RSS reader, it puts the images in between blocks of text. Though it is not the same as the full version, it doesn’t look ugly either.

Either solution can work and, if you choose the first or second route, there is a great WordPress plugin to help make it easier, but for most is it is easiest to just put the images in their own paragraph and move on.

Headings

Using CSS you can make your headings do just about anything you want, however, your complex formatting will disappear in the RSS feed. Thus, it is important to make sure that you choose a header that looks good as a subhead when viewed without any CSS.

For best results, you typically want to use either H2 or H3 as your article subhead as H4 through H6 typically looks to be the same or even smaller than regular text. H1, on the other hand, usually looks too much like a regular headline.

If you make it so that your default subhead is either H2 or H3, even if it means changing around some of your CSS variables, it can go a long way to making your RSS feeds look cleaner.

Tables

Like images, tables do display in most RSS readers but their alignment is problematic. You can use the same tricks with images to ensure that the table looks like it is paced well.

The bigger problem arises when people use CSS in tabled to display information, such as coloring cells to highlight information. For example, using red cells to indicate losses and green ones to indicate gains.

Still, some sites that use certain tables regularly set up special CSS classes for data they routinely have to get across. If possible, those changes should be put into the table itself, especially if you don’t use them a great deal in your posts.

Social News Elements

A lot of the more prominent social news buttons require JavaScript to work properly. Though some RSS readers to accept JavaScript, many don’t. As such, it is important to have versions of these links that don’t require any advanced languages.

Most social news sites provide very basic “Add to” links that should be adequate for your RSS feed. You can take the more advanced buttons and keep them for your site.

If you use FeedBurner, you can easily use Feed Flare to add many of the most popular social news sites to your RSS feed entries.

Embedded Content

Using embedded content, such as YouTube clips and podcast players, is very common in posts but can create headaches when viewing the content in an RSS feed. These embeds, which are often JavaScript embeds to beging with, routinely use plugins and features, such as Flash, not available to RSS readers.

It is typically best to avoid putting these into your posts when you can. But if you have to, always be sure to keep them on a separate line, preferably at the end of the post and, if the embed is done via JavaScript, include a “NOSCRIPT” tag for those viewing via RSS that encourages them to click through too the full post to see the content.

Also, if you are using Flash to embed a podcast and are a WordPress user, be sure to also include a full link to the MP3 so that WordPress will know that it is a podcast post and create the proper tags. Many RSS readers can’t access Flash players, but will see the podcast tags and let the viewer stream the audio via their own player. Google Reader, for example, does this.

Bottom Line

In the end, coding for your RSS feed is not that difficult, but one does have to be willing to make some sacrifices, especially bloggers that use a lot of images or other visual elements in their post.

It is important to realize, when designing your posts, that there is a good chance the majority of your readers will be seeing your posts not on the site, but via RSS. As such, you need to spend as much time making sure your RSS feed looks good as you do your site.

It’s something very trivial to do, but can pay off a big way with your readers.

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But with blog search being rendered almost irrelevant, staying on top of one’s topic of interest is becoming more and more difficult. There seems to be no one solution to this problem and, over the years, I’ve actually found many different ways to keep up to date.

Here are four of my favorites, complete with how they work and their advantages and disadvantages. As you’ll see, no system is perfect, but by using some or all of these systems together, you can keep on top of your field pretty easily.

Twitter Search

If you access Twitter Search and do a quick check for your topic of interest, you’ll also get the chance to subscribe to an RSS feed of the search, thus being notified whenever new tweets meet your criteria.

Advantages

Twitter search is both timely and thorough. You will find out about new articles of interest within minutes. It is also a great way to locate new Twitter users to follow and interact with.

You can also use the “Advanced Search” feature to narrow your results down to questions, posts with links, etc.

Disadvantages

Noise. Twitter searches carry a much larger volume than just about anything else. Feeds that might generate a few dozen “hits” on a blog search feed suddenly produce hundreds or thousands of results. Be careful with the keywords you choose lest your RSS reader become overrun.

Regator Searches

I briefly mentioned Regator in my first column. It is a very exclusive blog search engine that hand selects the sites it searches from. By registering for an account and then adding keywords to your “My Regator” panel, you can then subscribe to an RSS feed of your relevant phrases and search terms.

Advantages

Density. Every Regator search result is going to be something you want to read. Nearly every result is relevant and comes from a high-quality blog. Won’t overload your RSS, even with basic keywords.

Disadvantages

The biggest drawback is that there just isn’t a lot of results. Regator, by being human-edited, trades thoroughness for quality. I typically check my new Regator results first, but still have to quickly move on to other services or I miss critical information.

Delicious

Every Delicious search, whether it is a regular one, a tag one or subscriptions within your account, can be viewed via RSS. This can give you a stream of pages bookmarked with the relevant keywords.

Advantages

Delicious has a great ability for finding obscure and interesting links. Best of all, since the list is comprised of items added to people’s own account, relevancy is hiigh and the vast majority of the links will pertain to your topic.

Disadvantages

The downside is that links are added to your list by when they were bookmarked, not when they were posted. It is not uncommon to find links that are months, or even years old. Also, links are often repeated heavily, making the list seem redundant after a period of time.

Social News Feeds

Many social news sites, including Digg and Techmeme, will allow you to subscribe to any search result for their site, thus being notified when a new article is made popular on that topic.

Advantages

Relevancy is very high. Virtually anything in these feeds, especially if you only view the “popular” articles and not all new submissions, is going to be something to read. On most topics, the number of new posts is kept fairly reasonable.

Disadvantages

As with Regator, completeness is traded in for relevance. These feeds do not tell all of the news and always come with a slant related to their audience. The new submission feeds, if offered, are often too noisy and spammy to be much help.

Furthermore, if you’re only reading about an article or topic AFTER it has been posted to Digg, its likely a sign that something is wrong elsewhere with your alerts. I use this primarily as a “sanity check” to catch stories that were missed.

Conclusions

In the end, these are just some of the tools that you can use and, in the future, I may highlight some companies that are working on solutions for combining multiple streams of data into one feed you can use.

The bottom line though is that staying on top of your designated topic is not as simple as subscribing to a fictional newspaper and reading the news every morning, it takes work and effort.

At this time, technolgica solutions have not caught up to the problem and solving it is going to require a mix of patience ingenuity and powerful tools.

There are no easy answers, but there are definitely a few creative ones to be found.

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When I first started blogging over three years ago, blog search engines including Technorati and Google Blog Search were my favorite tools for keeping on top of who was talking about my topics, who was linking to my site and finding posts to comment on and offer help to.

However, over the years, the usefulness of these services have dwindled to nearly nothing. Where once nearly every great tip or connection came from either a Technorati Watchlist or a Google RSS feed, now I seem to get the best results from Twitter and more targeted searches.

The days of punching in a few keywords into Technorati and getting a stream of useful results is over. What follows now is a kludge of spam, off-topic posts and other noise that has to be sifted through to find the few grains of great content.

If blog searching isn’t dead, it certainly is very ill and it is time that something is done to fix it.

The Problems

All totaled, blog searching has at least five major problems that have helped to lessen its usefulness over the past few years.

1. Spam: Blog spam has exploded over the past tnree years and every blog search engine has struggled to keep the junk out while letting the real blogs in. This has not been an easy task and, thanks to scrapers, many results in blog search engines are repeated several times over with only one being the original post.
2. Non-Blogs with RSS: Three years ago, RSS was mosty a blogging phenomenon. Now it is not uncommon to see RSS feeds on mainstream news sites, forums, social networking sites and elsewhere. These sites often get picked up by blog search engines unwittingly and usually provide little added value.
3. Tag Gaming: Technorati may have brought the idea of tagging blog entries into the mainstream, but some bloggers have begun to abuse tags, usually by stuffing their posts full of unrelated keywords. This greatly hurts the accuracy of tag search results and has made tag searching dubious at best.
4. Incorrect Feeds: Even if a blog search engine has fund a true blog, it is not uncommon for it to mistake the comment feed, tag feed or category feed for a whole new blog. Worse still, depending on permalink structure, it may read these feeds as separate blogs, with separate URLs.
5. General Expansion: Perhaps the biggest problem is simply that there is many, many times more blogs than there was 3 years ago. Even if every blog were legit and every feed parsed a correct one, there would be a many-fold increase in the amount of noise to every keyword.

The major blog search engines have tried, with mixed results, to deal with this problem but both have managed to fail, each in their own unique way.

Paths to Failure

Technorati used to be the darling of blog search, with its massive index and authority-based rankings, it seemed to have the best system, even better than Google. But in recent months and years, the index has become dilluded with spam and duplicate content.

Even a simple link search for my own site turned up several cases of duplicate content, some by the Webmasters themselves, other times by the spam bloggers that scrape them. Worse still, some times the spammers would be indexed before the original site, making it appear that the spammer posted first.

The more active the keyword, the bigger this problem becomes. Though Technorati has counteracted this somewhat with its “authority” system, which looks at how often a blog is linked to, the system is far from perfect and setting the slider high enough to filter most of the spam also filters out a large number of legitimate blogs.

Searchers are forced to make a “devils choice” between accuracy and completeness.

Google Blog Search, on the other hand, seems to have done a respectable job keeping spam blogs at bay but a far worse one at keeping other results out. Forums, comment feeds, etc. routinely make appearances in Google Blog Search and can quickly drown out some keywords.

To make matters worse, Google has a strange way of ordering results, leading to a lot of very old content ranking well, even when newer stories are breaking.

Most frustrating, however, is how Google has rendered it’s own link results, which are used by default in the WordPress dashboard, useless. It recently made the decision to index pages, not RSS feeds.

Though the decision was great news for sites wth partial feeds as their full content would now be indexed, it meant also that all links on the page, including blogroll links, would be counted. That meant if a site has you linked in their blogroll, you’ll likely see every post they publish in your WordPress dashboard or your link feed.

All in all, the problem is frustrating but it doesn’t come with easy answers. The brightest minds in search have been stumped and it doesn’t appear that any perfect answers are on the horizon.

Ways to Address the Issue

Several smaller blog and news search engines have arisen to address this issue, most focused on limiting the index to only the best blogs. Examples of this include Regator, Blog Search Engine (owned by SplashPress and partnered with Icerocket) and Twingly all work on this principle of greater control over the index to yield better results.

The problem with these search engines is two-fold. First, the indexes have to either be maintained by humans or by some form of automated process. If it is the latter, it is only a matter of time before spammers learn how to game it. If it is the first, then maintenance costs will go up and new sites will be slower to appear.

Secondly, these sites, as with Technorati authority, are a trade off between accuracy and completeness. The results may be relatively spam and garbage free, but they will miss at leas some legitimate blogs.

Though these are imperfect and inelegant solutions, they are likely the best ones available.

Conclusions

Personally, I’ve begun to seek out and use other means of staying on top of my field. Subscribing to relevant blogs directly, using Twitter search feeds, watching incoming Delicious links and social news sites seem to do the job much better.

I’m almost to a point where I am ready to completely unsubscribe to my blog search feeds but I’m not prepared to give up yet, I keep holding out some hope that Technorati and/or Google will figure it out.

Though the heyday of blog search may have passed, its memory remains strong.

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Though Facebook’s new TOS, which removed the clause that lets users end their license granted to Facebook by deleting their work, was both of poor judgment and very worrisome, it was likely much ado about. Not only was the TOS rescinded shortly after the controversy began, but even with the new TOS, Facebook’s rights were still limited by the user’s privacy settings.

What has gotten significantly less attention is the sheer number of TOS’ that most Web users sign just as part of being on the Web. In an age where almost every site is also a “service”, it seems we’re creating more accounts than ever and, with every sign up, signing away more and more of our rights.

Most of us have lost track of all the sites we have registered for, the agreements we have signed and few of us actually take the time to even skim the terms that we do accept. Our rights to our online lives are in millions of pieces, scattered across countless companies and sites.

Piecing them back together, if it became necessary, could be nearly impossible. Worse still, as many of these companies continue to expand and grow the rights they give themselves via their TOS,

It has come time to question our love affair for new services and the terms they force us to agree to and seek ways to streamline and simplify this very messy process.

Why Terms of Service are Necessary

For most Web 2.0 sites, a terms of service is a necessary evil. To provide their function, they need to both protect themselves against users that might try to abuse their service, such as spammers, by laying down ground rules for use and they need to secure permissions from their users in order to do the things.

The problem is that copyright and privacy laws make it so that, without permission, it would be against the law for many Web 2.0 sites to do what they do. Simple things such as displaying bios, cropping avatars to size or converting videos to a Web-playable format could be seen as infringements on user rights.

Though it might seem to be patently obvious that YouTube is going to convert videos to FLV format or Facebook is going to display your profile image, without rights clearances in the TOS, those uses could become the focus of court battles. A good terms of service can avert these issues by getting the user to sign an agreement through clickwrap that spells out the rights they are giving YouTube, Facebook, etc.

The problem is that the rights these sites lay claim to are almost always greater than the ones absolutely necessary. Some of this is because it is easier to grab more (EX: It is easier to simply give oneself the right to make derivative works than to list a set of situations where it is acceptable to do so, such as video conversion), sometimes it is a matter of covering bases (claiming rights not necessary but might be related or needed later) or a matter of future planning (thinking about potential mergers, buyouts, etc.)

Back end changes have also had an impact on the way TOS’ are written. When a site begins to use a cloud storage solution, such as Amazon S3, it needs to ensure it has rights from the user to do so and adequate permission to sign Amazon’s own TOS.

As a result of this, TOS’ have grown over the years. Though none I’ve seen have gone so far as to actually try and claim all rights to user-generated work, something that would likely not stand up in court, the rights that various sites have been claiming have grown more and more broad, both as Web-based services have become more complicated and the legal climate causes companies to to expand their terms to better protect themselves.

Why To Worry

Anyone who has ever signed a terms of service needs to be at least somewhat worried by this trend. Though the odds of any one person having their work misused via a TOS or having some need to reclaim the rights they gave away are slim, the reason to worry is still there, consider the following:

1. Most active Web users have signed dozens, if not hundreds, of terms of service agreements. Most of which they have barely read at all.
2. Each of those TOS’ have different rights which the user has granted that particular site over any work that passes through their service.
3. Much of the content, including avatars, bios, images and other information is posted on many different sites.
4. Most TOS’ have a clause in them that allow the site admins to unilaterally update the TOS with X days notice. However, these updates are rarely well advertised.
5. For the most part, only large sites, such as Facebook, have any real scrutiny of their TOS

As users we’ve become accustomed to jumping on every new service and clicking straight past the TOS. However, that habit is very dangerous for many different reasons and, as the number of sites we register for and host our content with grows, so will the potential for something to go very wrong.

Preventing Problems

Though we are unlikely to lose our fascination with the latest social networking or content sharing sites, there are several things we can do to protect ourselves from becoming victims of a TOS gone awry.

1. Self-Host: A TOS only applies when content is hosted on or somehow passes through another’s service. Whenever possible, host content that is valuable to you on your own server. With shared hosting accounts so inexpensive, you can likely create your own image host for less per month than a paid Flickr or Imageshack account and not worry as much about the TOS.
2. Read Carefully: It only takes a few moments to read the important parts of a TOS before signing up. Definitely do so, especially if you plan on putting any content on it.
3. Limit the Places You Post: Limit the places you post your work. For example. If you can’t host your own blog, keep all of your blogging on one provider. The same goes for images, social networking, etc.

However, it is the companies themselves that could easily do the most. Rather than burying their terms and actively discouraging users from reading them, they could work to make them more clear and presentable.

One example would be Talkshoe, which has its users license their audio underneath a Creative Commons License rather than read a long, complicated list of rights. This makes it immediately clear to the user, in human-readable format, what rights they are giving up by using the service and what rights they keep. Also, it makes it so that others have the same access to the work as Talkshoe, preventing Talkshoe from claiming any kind of relative exclusivity.

Conclusions

The good news is that Facebook has reverted back to its old TOS after the uproar and has created a new group for getting feedback on its terms. It has recognized that these issues are important to its users and are working to bring their input in and involve them in any future changes.

That has the potential to be a very good example for others in the industry.

However, the problem does still remain. With Web users having signed countless TOS’, many of which are updating regularly with little attention, it is easy to see how the rights to user’s work are scattered and confusing.

The need to simplify all of this has never been more clear and the need for users to take responsibility for the TOS’ they sign and read the terms provided them has never been greater.

In the future, hopefully we can find some way to make these terms both consistent and clear, perhaps with the aid of Creative Commons, but in the meantime, we have to be careful what we sign, even if it is just with the click of a mouse.

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Earlier this month, the same company announced the public beta of its new product, FairShare, a free service designed to help help bloggers track their’s content’s usage, check for license compliance and understand who is using their works and how.

Though the service has some limitations, it can be a valuable tool for bloggers to get a glimpse at how their content is used on the Web and where some of their untracked readers may be hiding.

The Basics

Attributor is a professional content-tracking and management company that works with a variety of major content creators including CondeNet and The Financial Times. They run their own search engine, which has over 35 billion sites indexed, and provide results in 13 different languages.

Their full service provides advanced content tracking, with sorting and in-depth analysis, and tools for resolving cases of copyright infringement. With FairShare, they’ve taken the same service, removed some of the advanced features and repackaged it as a free service for smaller Web publishers.

To use FairShare, one simply gives the site their RSS feed’s address, selects a license for their content, either a Creative Commons License or an all rights reserved one, and then subscribes to the RSS feed that the service produces.

Within about eight hours, FairShare will start scanning the existing contents of the RSS feed and finding matches for them. Once that happens, the FairShare feed will start posting “entries” for each match. Each FairShare match will contain information on the number of words matched, the percent of the original source used, whether the match site links to the source, whether the match displays ads and whether it is compliant with your CC license (if applicable).

The drawback is that the feed is pretty much a “raw list” of matches at this time. Though there are plans to introduce new feeds to the system that will allow users to focus in on certain match types, there is not much way currently to sort or filter the results at this time (other than selecting a weekly summary feed).

Also, there are no tools for dealing with any infringements detected. Users have the responsibility to choose what action they want to take and how to take it. The system is purely focused on providing information.

However, the information can be very valuable and, even if bloggers don’t want to stop any uses of their work, knowing where and how it appears can be a huge asset.

The Benefits

For bloggers, the potential benefits of free, effective and effortless content tracking can be many, but most will be interested in one of the following three things:

1. Detecting Copyright Infringement: The most basic use of the service is to locate people who are misusing your content and then finding a way to stop it.
2. Content Optimization: Seeing which of your entries are copied the most and where they appear can help bloggers plan future works. It also provides clues as to sites that might be good for outreach and linking building, especially with unlinked uses of content.
3. Conversation Participation: Finding out where else your work appears gives you a chance to see what others are saying about it and engage in conversation with those people. Giving you a chance to interact with others who’ve read your work and, perhaps, direct them back to your site.

Obviously the uses are not mutually exclusive, for example one might want to stop spam bloggers while engaging with other, more human, webmasters. However, the service can have sharp benefit for bloggers, whether or not they have an interest in stopping any use of their work.

Caveats

As mentioned above, the service does have a few drawbacks, namely that it doesn’t provide any help sorting or prioritizing cases nor does it provide any assistance with resolution.

It is also worth noting that, right now, the service can be a bit overwhelming for very active sites, producing hundreds of matches per day. It can certainly create a very busy RSS feed if your content is used in a lot of different places.

Finally, the service, right now, is only for sites with full RSS feeds. If your blog or Web site does not provide an RSS feed, it is not available at all and, if you use a partial feed, your matches will likely be a bit weaker. However you can use FeedBurner to create a full feed for FeedShare, and other services that need it, and a separate, partial one for your readers.

Despite these drawbacks, there is little reason to not try the service. It is free and stopping it is as simple as unsubscribing from the FairShare feed.

Bottom Line

If you’re a blogger and you’ve ever been curious about how your content is being used on other sites, this is a good opportunity to find out. If you need an invite code you can either use the one provided to my readers “PlagiarismToday”, of which a limited number remain, or follow FairShare on Twitter. They may be able to provide you with one as well.

If you find yourself wanting more assistance than what FairShare can provide, including human analysis of potential matches and assistance with resolution, you can also sign up for bLoigics copyright protection service. Also, very large bloggers and blogging networks may wish to consider Attributor’s main service, especially if they want more direct control over how their content is used.

In either case, the FairShare system is probably not powerful enough by itself to provide all of the needed tools.

In the end though, whether you are seriously interested in stopping content theft or merely curious in how your content is being used, FairShare is a worthwhile service to try out.

Though it may not fulfill every need a blogger has, it is a great start and can help provide the information that most would not otherwise have.

Disclosure: I have consulted for Attributor and was an early tester of the FairShare system.

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Whatever the reason, cutting through the veil of a site to learn what makes it tick can be a tricky feat, especially for those who are not familiar with the inner workings of the Web. Navigating through a mess of Whois results and DNS information can be very useful, but also intimidating.

So how does one learn more about a site, preferably without being inundated with confusing information? Here are five simple bookmarklets that can teach you more about a site with just one click.

If you want to know who is hosting a site, there is no easier or faster way to learn than WhoIsHostingThis. Simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser too bar, click it and the site will tell you who the host is of that particular page. WhoIsHostingThis doesn’t make you wade through a mess of DNS records or other advanced information. It does the math for you, giving you the name of the host.

As a warning, the service is not perfect. Though it’s accuracy is very good and getting better every day, there are times it does get things wrong. It’s important to do a sanity check when using the service.

It’s hard to imagine getting much more information about a site out of one bookmarklet. Installing this in your browser’s toolbar and clicking it will literally bring you eight pages of information including how popular it is in social news/networking sites, its estimated traffic, information about the server and even any Twitter accounts associated with it.

Surprisingly, Quarkbase does not tell you anything about who is hosting the site or the site’s PageRank. However, these omissions only seem glaring in light of the information Quarkbase does provide.

A bookmarklet well worth adding to your browser.

Smart PageRank does one thing and it does it well, it tells you the PageRank of the site that you are on. It’s that simple.

But what makes the service so “Smart” is that it checks the site both with and without the “www”, letting you detect any possible errors or problems. It also provides a slew of other information including Alexa traffic data, a backlink analysis and an estimated number of pages indexed (though this feature doesn’t seem to be perfect on some search engines).

A great tool for getting a quick overview of the SEO of a particular site and ideal for those that don’t wish to run the Google Toolbar or another PageRank extension, but do want to know score of a page from time to time.

Even though Domain Tools is the kind provides the kind of intimidating information many people try to avoid, it presents it in a clear and simple manner. Through its results, you can see who’s name the domain is registered in, information about the server, its IP address, information about inbound links and references in search engines/directories.

For those that need more powerful information, Domain Tools has one-click access to IP Whois, Traceroute, advanced DNS and other information that can help you further track down how a site operates.

It’s one thing to know how a site or page looks today, but the Wayback Machine’s bookmarklet (Scroll down to “Take The Wayback Machine With You”) makes it possible to see how the site looked at almost any point in that site’s history. By letting you look at old versions of a page, you can not only see how its look and feel changed, but how the content evolved.

Perhaps most powerful of all is that, by looking at the first copies of page that are stored, you can get an approximate idea of the age of the site, making it a great tool for understanding how a site grew up and came to be whatever it is today.

Conclusions

The beauty of bookmarklets is that they are a free and easy way to extend the power of nearly any browser. By dragging and dropping these links into your bookmark toolbar, you can turn your browser into an information-gathering powerhouse, one capable of getting almost any detail about the page you are looking at with the click of a mouse.

You may not need all of these bookmarklets or even most of them, but just one or two of these can greatly expand your understanding of the Web sites you visit.

Even if you don’t need the information for any business or personal reason, it can be a lot of fun and very interesting to peek behind the veil of a site and see beyond the HTML code.

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When I first heard about Paul Thewlis’ new book, WordPress for Business Bloggers, I was very excited. As an avid WordPress user and a business blogger, I was very keen on the idea of reading a book targeted specifically to my kind of blogging. Though I’ve owned and read many books about WordPress and about blogging in general, none have seen so targeted to me.

However, the title of the book doesn’t do a great deal to describe it. One could not possibly do a thorough job of describing business blogging and WordPress within the confines of the same 350 page book so it has to either be A) A book about business blogging that touches on WordPress or B) A book about WordPress that touches on business blogging.

The book, for better or worse, is the latter. Only one chapter, the first, really delves into the business blogging and most of it is about planning. The rest of the book is a basic, if solid, overview of blogging and WordPress in general.

This is not to say that it is a bad book, just that those who might be most excited by the title may find it a bit basic and frustrating. On the other hand, there are others that might pass it over that could find it very useful.

Audience

When I started reading this book, I tried to keep two different audiences in mind:

1. Myself: I am a “veteran” blogger that has over three years experiencing using WordPress. I’m a business blogger, using it to promote my consulting practice, but understand the software relatively well and would likely be considered an “advanced” user (though not quite “expert”).
2. My Friend: I am good friends with and share office space with an attorney who, despite being a very capable lawyer, is new to blogging. I just set up his first WordPress install a few weeks ago and he’s excited about getting involved with blogging and using it for both promotion and networking.

With that in mind, it is clear that the book is much more targeted to my friend than to myself. If you’ve been blogging and using WordPress for some time, you likely already understand about 95% of this book. Though there might be a few new tips and tricks to pick up, I doubt that it will be worth the price of ownership.

However, for someone like my friend, who is new at WordPress and blogging in general, it could be a valuable guide. Though, even with that audience in mind, it is still a slightly flawed work. Still, it is easy to see how some might benefit from it.

The Good

Overall, the book is a solid intro into getting started with a standalone WordPress blog. Someone who had no experience with WordPress would very likely be able to go through and do a reasonable job of installing it and setting up a site. Though there is clearly going to be a learning curve outside of the book when it comes to things such as designing your site or writing good content, that is to be expected.

What the book provides is not a thorough run through of everything one has to do to get a site working, but rather, a “basic training” or perhaps a “WordPress boot camp” for those who don’t know which end is up.

Can you learn almost all of this online for free? Sure. But for those that don’t want to trudge through online manuals or just prefer a book, something I suspect is typical of most future business bloggers, it is likely a decent choice.

Still, the book could use some tweaking, there are a few flaws in it that may limit how far people are able to get with it.

The Bad

First off, the book does suffer from a minor case of “difficulty curve lurch”. I find it odd that the same chapter that explains to the reader that HTML tags are the things between the square brackets also does a run through of how to set up a test server on your computer using XAMPP in seemingly a few pages.

Though the use of XAMPP is necessary to use the examples in the book, anyone who is intimidated by something as fundamental as tags is going to have problems when trying to understand a SQL server and why they are installing one on their computer.

However, the book, as much as anything, suffers from a case of bad timing. In the period between when it was researched/authored and when it landed in my lap WordPress 2.7 was released, making many of the screenshots obsolete, FeedBurner began to have serious problems, making it a less appealing choice for stat tracking, and blogrolls, at least without a “nofollow”, became a major cause of PageRank reduction, making it less-desireable habit.

Though these types of problems are to be expected with the publishing cycle, all of these elements play a major role in the book and seem to hamstring it a bit.

Finally, the book omits or only pays some attention to a few key elements.

1. There is no serious conversation about how to find a host. Most of the work is done on the local test site with little indication of how to find a good Web host.
2. Social news sites such as Digg and Reddit and services such as StumbleUpon are only paid some minor attention, a few pages in the whole of the book. Almost as much is given to Twitter by itself and installing much-derided Twitter plugins for WordPress. Even Technorati seems to get as much attention.
3. There is no talk about offline editing tools such as Windows Live Writer. Though I agree that the WordPress write panel is more than adequate for most tasks, many do prefer such applications and many newcomers may prefer them versus the WordPress editor.

Though I don’t consider these omissions to be “deal breakers”, it does seem to date the book a bit and make me think that it is ripe for a second version.

Bottom Line

I don’t think that this book is for me nor is it likely for anyone reading this review. If you are reading the Blog Herald, you’re probably familiar enough with WordPress that you would be better served by jumping into a more advanced book. There are books of equal size that focus solely on things such a blog design, monetization and promotion that can offer much more.

That being said, if you know anyone who is just getting started with blogging they can do a lot worse than this book.

In that regard though, the worst thing about the book is the title. Though it isn’t quite as basic as a “for dummies” book, the crowd that would get the most from it will be most drawn to that kind of book.

The reality is that this book isn’t so much “WordPress for Business Bloggers” as it is “WordPress for Beginner Bloggers” or, perhaps just “Getting Started Blogging using WordPress”.

It’s basic, it’s an overview and it is below the level of most bloggers. But for those seeking a place to start it is a solid enough beginning.

In the end, I’m probably going to give my copy of this book to my lawyer friend, I think he’ll get more out of it than I. That’s not a bad thing, just a sign that maybe the title could have used an adjustment.

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As true as that may be, what happens if you decide you want to pack up and leave the Web altogether? That you aren’t comfortable having a Web site, blog, Flickr account or anything else in your name? Perhaps its privacy concerns that bother you, a change of heart about what’s important in life or just a wish to have a fresh start. Either way, what happens after you hit “delete” and say goodbye.

As it turns out, the answer isn’t as simple as many think. Removing your content from the Web is not as easy as canceling your accounts, nor is it completely impossible. Much of it depends on the type of content you’ve produced, where you’ve placed it and how the public has responded to it.

There are a lot of questions about where your content goes after you delete it, questions well worth considering just in case one day you do decide to pull the plug.

Is It Possible?

It is often debated about whether or not it is possible to truly delete anything on the Web. Most likely, the answer is no, it is not. With the Web, too many copies exist of a work to safely remove them all. However, whether or not copies exist that can be easily found is a different matter.

This issue has caught the attention of the head of the British Library, Lynne Brindle, who said that “If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics… the memory of the nation disappears too.”

Though the examples Brindle gave, the old White House Web site and various sites for the Sydney Olympics, are likely poor examples, the point does remain that sites do often go down with no clear sources for locating its content. Though, most likely, the information could be found if there were some dire need to, for example, a police investigation, most people are not going to attract enough attention to warrant such steps.

However, the difficulty involved in removing content from the Web is proportional to how interesting others find it. A celebrity sex tape, for example, is virtually impossible to remove from the Web. On the other hand, a 100-page diatribe about plant biology in the South Pacific will likely be much easier to (effectively) remove.

This raises the question, for those of us who are not celebrities, what happens after we hit the “delete” key on our Internet lives? As it turns out, most of the echoes and shadows we cast begin to disappear within just a few moments.

Scrubbing the Web

The good news is that, the moment you delete something from the Web, its presence begins to deteriorate quickly. Though all content we post on the Web leaves shadows, they begin to fade pretty shortly after the work is gone.

Both locally-cached and ISP-cached copies of pages typically disappear within a few hours (though many users will have their local copies preserved for some time, until they purge their local cache). Other temporary cache resources such as Google Cache and Coral Cache typically fade away within a few days.

All of this is automated and requires no action on the part of the content owner. Most sites and services have no interest in permanently caching deleted information.

However, there are exceptions to the rule, most notably the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive not only stores previous versions of Web sites, but keeps the stored versions up after they have been removed. For example, if you want to see what the original pets.com looked like, even though the company behind it is gone, you can check it out.

If you want to be thorough in deleting your content and remove it from the Internet Archive, you need to either use robots.txt exclusion before deleting the site, something that you have to plan for in advance, or file a notice and have them remove it. The former strategy is faster and better, but doesn’t help if you’ve already shut your site down.

However, this just covers the incidental and well-known archives, works are not just copied by search engine spiders and caching systems. Many times, they are copied by people and other bots. In the long run, those are the copies that may be hardest to remove.

Copy Artists

In addition to the copies of a work that get made just by posting a work to the Web, there are many others that humans and bots make that help distribute a work well beyond its original location.

For one, humans, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not, republish work on other Web sites. Whether it is a quote for a review or an outright plagiarism, it’s a common activity. Second, scrapers, spammers and aggregators copy and paste content wholesale, usually without permission.

Though one certainly still holds copyright over any work they create, whether it is online or not, filing takedown notices or taking action against every copy is likely impractical. Not only are many of the uses likely to be within the bounds of fair use, but others will be in countries with no takedown system.

The result is that, while you can definitely file notices for many such uses, you can’t for all. Furthermore, the time and energy to remove every work possible would be incredible. This is a large part of why even the most aggressive copyright holders prioritize the infringers they go after.

On the other hand, those sites too have a limited shelf life. Spam blogs are typically shut down within a few weeks or months and most other sites reach a point where they too are shuttered. As a work gets older, interest in it wanes and copying becomes less frequent. Over time, copies of the work may exist, but they are so few and far between that one searching for it would be unlikely to find it.

How long that takes will vary wildly, but in a few years, typically, most easily located copies of a work will be gone, barring any kind of extreme public interest, would likely be gone.

Conclusions

The bottom line is simple, though there is no way to truly delete something on the Web, it is possible, and even probable, that, with time, it can be arranged so that no one can find the work in question. It may require some pre-planning and some work after the fact, but it can be done.

However, don’t expect it to be so easy, or even possible, if your creation is of some heightened public interest. At that point, the adage of the Web being impossible to disappear in is likely true.

But for the rest of us, who have limited interest in our works and aren’t celebrities, it is a very different story. We might not be able to disappear completely, but we likely can do so enough that one will not easily find us.

It is small comfort, but for those who want to disappear to a villa in Key West without thinking of the Web, it is all they can realistically hope for.

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However most of these products turn out not to live up to their hype. At best they are a waste of time, at worst they are an outright scam.

So who is out to scam you and who is here to help? Well, here are some of the more common types of copyright protection services and what you should look out for before you sign on the dotted line.

Plagiarism/Infringement Detection

For the most part, there are three types of companies that get involved in plagiarism detection:

1. Good intentioned people who simply bite off more than they can chew.
2. Scammers out to make a quick buck.
3. Large companies that are investing real time and money developing a serious product.

The dirty truth is that serious content tracking and plagiarism checking is not simple. It is not a problem that a skillful programmer solves in a weekend. Text matching seems simple, but rarely is.

To make matters even more complicated, there are actually two types of plagiarism checkers. The first is the kind universities use, which check a work to see if it is original. The second is the kind bloggers and other content creators use, which searches for all matches to a work. Both have different standards of effectiveness and neither, typically, does the job of the other very well.

Generally speaking, when creating a detection service for content creators, you have only two choices. The first is to partner with a major search provider, such as Google or Yahoo!. The second is to create you own database, complete with the storage and processing requirements.

If a checker opts for the first path, then its results will always be less complete than standard searches on their partner engine. It is just a matter if the convenience and effort justify the cost and missed matches.

When selecting such a system for your work, find out where they get their results from and compare the results it gives you with your own searches. A good system will return almost all of the same matches as a regular search unique phrase in the work,

Also, make sure that you are using a checker that is designed for this exact purpose. Many will try to market to both groups but such tools seem to do neither job very well.

In the end, it is important to check behind your plagiarism checker, if nothing else than to make sure the results are as good as promised.

Copyright Registration Services

Right now there are literally dozens of sites out there that will promise to help you protect your work by “registering” it with their entity.

Unfortunately, most of it winds up being just an ugly scam.

What most of these companies provide is something that is called non-repudiation, meaning support or evidence in the event of a dispute.

While that sounds good, and isn’t a bad thing by itself, many of these sites advertise themselves as “copyright registration services”, causing laypeople to be confused, thinking it has a relationship with the United States Copyright Office.

If you are seeking extra legal protection for your work and you live in the U.S., you need to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office, which can be found at copyright.gov. Though some services will actually aid you in registering your work there, usually at a highly inflated fee, the process of registering is simple and can be done by just about anyone.

Non-repudiation services may provide some verification of ownership, they have not been tested in any courts. Their best use has more to do with the court of public opinion than a court of law.

If you wish to use such a service, free and very low-cost ones are available. Paying more makes no sense as the cost of storing a fingerprint of a work in a database is almost nothing.

Be especially wary of any company that uses scare tactics or has a very high registration fee. They often times are just trying to prey on people’s confusion about copyright.

Digital Rights Management

Though DRM has become something of a pariah in recent years, that has not stopped a slew of companies from coming out with ways to “prevent copyright infringement” or “protect content on the Web”.

This is especially common when dealing with images, where photographers and artists are eager to prevent their work from being repurposed and have less that they can do in the form of detection.

The problem is that such DRM tactics never really work as advertised. If billion-dollar companies such as Sony are unable to produce 100% effective DRM, even when they are installing rogue software on machines, how can any company, when delivering products over the Web, guarantee success?

Typically, such tools do more to frustrate users than they do to protect work. Whether they range from simple JavaScript trickery to advanced tools that embed content in Flash objects, these tools fail to provide any real security but do a great job hindering people that actually wish to look at the content.

The good news is that image matching technology is rapidly improving, making it possible to detect where an image is passed around on the Web, similar to what we now do with text. As this technology improves, the need and desire for preventing copying is lessened.

In the meantime, the only 100% way to protect an image is through a visual watermark on top of it. Though it tarnishes the look of an image, especially if it is done poorly, and does nothing to prevent copying, it prevents the image from being distributed without correct attribution, hinders commercial use and aids others in informing you about where it appears.

All in all, though it probably makes sense to prevent leeching of your server bandwidth, steps to prevent copying of your audiovisual works will either be completely ineffective, or hindering to legitimate users.

Either way, they probably aren’t worth the effort and certainly aren’t worth the money.

Conclusions

When it comes to copyright, there are a lot of companies out there eager to make a quick buck.

It is a fertile field for individuals and organizations that seek to take advantage of others. When you combine the confusion that exists around the law, strange technologies that have only recently come into existence and a lot of fear on the part of content creators.

The simple truth is that people put a lot of time and energy into the work they post on the Web and don’t want to see it misused. Even if they are comfortable allowing a great deal of reuse, most still have boundaries they would rather not see crossed.

This makes for a field rife for both those that wish to create a legitimate business and those who those that just wish to turn a quick buck.

Fortunately, people are getting smarter about the laws and technologies, but if the search results and advertisements are any indication, we still have a long way to go.

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The plugin, as well as Dan Zarella’s plugin by the same name, searches Twitter to for tweets that link back to posts on the blog and displays those tweets on the site under their respective entries, much like a trackback, but with Twitter (hence the name).

These plugins do, by their very nature, copy and paste tweets, displaying them on the user’s Web site, all without the explicit permission to of the author. Where trackbacks are sent from the linking site and comments are left intentionally by the visitor, these plugins are different in that they activelhy go out in search of these “tweetbacks” (including parsing URL shortening services), even though the creator has taken no steps to ensure they appear on the site.

This, in turn, raises serious issues about copyright, scraping and more that have to be at least looked at. Is it legal to copy and publish tweets from others without permission, simply because they link back to your site? The answers are not as simple as one might initially think.

Previous Coverage

Back in May I posted a somewhat controversial article on this site about Twitter and Copyright. The article was more broad in nature but concluded that it was difficult, though not impossible, for a tweet to meet the criteria for copyrightability.

However, with tweetbacks, which link to original articles, there is even less potential for copyrightability. Not only does the URL reduce the potential character count, but typically such tweets are just a short, fact-based description of the post itself.

But this isn’t to say that such tweets could never be copyrightable. Shorter works, including Haiku, routinely do enjoy copyright protection and are sufficiently original enough to have that protection hold up in court.

The problem with copyright law is that it only takes one “perfect storm” to create trouble. If one tweet were to be copyrightable, the Twitter user had registered their feed, the user did not wish to see it appear elsewhere, discovered the use and was in a position to take action on it (including either registering the work with the USCO or being in a country with no such obligation), there could be issues. Though the odds of such a situation happening are incredibly slim, when you spread those odds across millions of Twitter users and hundreds of times as many tweets, it becomes at least an outside chance.

This isn’t to say that this should be a huge worry for those using these plugins, but that it is a possibility. However, there are still more factors to consider.

A More Likely Problem

Rather than someone using copyright to file a successful lawsuit or legitimate takedown notice. I would be more worried about someone using it as leverage to harass or annoy a blogger. Consider the following:

1. A blogger creates a controversial post.
2. A Twitter user links to the post in their account, likely to complain about it.
3. Tweetback plugin grabs the tweet and reposts it.
4. Twitter user either doesn’t understand or ignore copyright issues and files takedown notice to get it removed.
5. Host complies, but is either forced to disable the entire post or have the user remove the plugin for the moment.

Though this situation is potentially very scary, it is actually a situation faced every time a blogger uses someone else’s content, even if it is just to quote it and do so within the bounds of what is likely fair use. Tweetbacks are hardly the only time this situation is encountered and, in my experience, certainly not the most dangerous.

People who are likely to get upset over, likely legitimate, use of their content typically do so over more deliberate use and not over automated ones, such as Tweetbacks. Quoting, citing and screenshots are, historically, much more risky behaviors.

Is It Scraping?

Another, though somewhat more broad, question is whether or not these plugins are guilty of “scraping” Twitter. The answer is most likely no.

Twitter provides a robust API and a terms of service for the different elements for it.

If these plugins follow the API and its guidelines, and it seems there is no reason they wouldn’t, then an accusation of scraping would be hard to sustain. It would be like following a Creative Commons license and being accused of copyright infringement.

That being said, the ways the two different plugins go about pulling Tweetbacks are different and worth noting. Dan Zarrella’s, for example, uses JavaScript and pulls down the tweets with almost every page load. Joost De Valk’s, on the other hand, copies the tweets to a database on the blog’s server. Though De Valk’s plugin likely results in faster displaying of tweets, Zarrella’s raises fewer copyright issues.

Since Zarrella’s implementation is JavaScript-based, if someone wished to remove their tweet from a site, the easiest way would be to just delete the tweet themselves from their own stream (Note: I spoke with De Valk and he informed me that removing a tweet from your stream does NOT remove it from the search, not only does this create privacy issues in general, but negates this advantage at this time). However, with the De Valk’s plugin, depending on how it handles deleted tweets, it would likely remain up.

Furthermore, the database implementation create a more permanent copy of the tweet rather than the JavaScript one, which creates more temporary ones. Zarrella’s implementation more closely resembles browser caching and ISP caching, creating only short-lived copies that are needed to transmit the data.

Is this to say that De Valk’s plugin is an infringement or that people who use it need to fear copyright problems? Not necessarily. Just that if Tweetbacks were to become a copyright issue, De Valk’s plugin would raise more issues.

Bottom Line

These plugins are a pretty novel new use of Twitter and, with such newness comes a new set of potential legal questions. Though the likelihood of any serious copyright trouble from using Tweetbacks are slim to none, as with anything that is used by a large number of people, the popularity of a service increases the likelihood that someone will find themselves in a dispute.

Though I would be hard pressed to call Tweetbacks a form of “scraping”, considering that Twitter intentionally licenses such access to their data via an API and a TOS, it is easy to see how some users, not expecting or foreseeing that their Tweets could start appearing on other sites, could be upset and, since they are the ones that hold copyright interest in the work, they are the ones with the right to file any copyright complaint.

However, the likelihood of such copyright complaints rising to anything beyond saber rattling are slim to none. Simply put, most tweets aren’t likely copyrightable, even more so for those including links. The bigger danger is that the copyright issues could be used as an excuse to harass a site with the plugin installed.

Still, it might be worthwhile to warn visitors that, if they tweet your post, it will appear as a Tweetback. Displaying tweetbacks should be warning enough, but offering “Tweet This” tools and an explicit statement can’t hurt either.

However, even without such warnings, the risks and issues that exist with tweetbacks also exist any time one uses content from another source, no matter how legitimate the use.

In the end, though there are some logical comparisons between tweetbacks and traditional RSS scraping, but the likely lack of copyrightable material and blank check permission from Twitter separates tweetbacks from it.

Furthermore, unlike RSS scraping, most Twitter users are likely going to be happy to have their tweets displayed on other sites. With so little time going into each Tweet and almost no SEO benefit, there is little lost in having one’s Twitter feed scraped. However, given the social nature of Twitter, there may be a lot to be gained.

Still, it only takes one person to create a problem and, until that person appears, it remains to be seen what the exact implications are.

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However, Creative Commons can actually provide bloggers benefits that go well beyond the buttons and badges. In the uncertain copyright climate of the Web, having a firm lawyer-written license, regardless of what it says, can have huge benefits over the ambiguity that comes with not having one.

Here are just five less-promoted ways that choosing a CC license can help you, your site and your content, even as you surrender some of your rights in a particular work.

5. Search Engine Benefit

Though it is unclear if using Creative Commons will get you a higher rank in Google, there is no doubt that it will get your content into CC-oriented search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! This can help expose your work to many new visitors.

The only caveat to this audience is that, when they are searching for CC-licensed material, searchers are looking for something to use on their site, not necessarily something to follow and enjoy. However, most searchers visit dozens of links before they find one that works and often times they discover new writers, artists and musicians along the way.

Likewise, Flickr users that add CC licenses to their images will find that their content comes up on more image searches and more API queries. Even if it is not used every time, or even most of the time, it is additional exposure.

4. Greater Copyright Clarity

One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that there are many people on the Web that are confused about what exactly they can and can not do with content licensed under a traditional “All Rights Reserved” license. However, thanks in part to the buttons, CC terms are clearly explained, within reason.

Though the exact limitations in some cases are confusing, especially when dealing with non-commercial licenses, there is much less confusion and headache to end users and this encourages them to actually follow the license. As Anthony Falzone, the executive director of the Stanford Fair Use Project, said in one of his presentations that Creative Commons is a GUI for copyright and that though, like Windows, it may crash once in a while, it is a lot easier to use than MSDOS.

This clarity not only makes it easier for you to express your terms, but for others to follow your wishes, at least in spirit. That, in turn, makes it more likely they will do so.

3. More Likely to be Quoted

Though fair use allows others to quote and cite content from your blog, the broad fair use exemptions are a largely American invention and, even then, are very difficult to predict and use successfully. As a result, many people are not comfortable quoting even small portions of content without permission, even if the fear is unjustified in most cases.

Having a CC license offers encouragement for that kind of reuse and lets anyone interested in reusing some of your text that you are fine with it. Though the lack of a CC license may not stop many people from quoting you who was going to do so previously, it does encourage others to quote more from your site, talk more about it and link more to your work than they might have otherwise.

2. Less Time Dealing with Infringement

Though, as a copyright holder, you have the right to decide what cases you deal with and which you do not, setting up ambiguous rules makes enforcement difficult and can lead to problems. Having a Creative Commons license allows you to give permission for what might otherwise be an accidental infringement, or a more minor misstep, and focus only on those that plagiarize and/or use your material for commercial use.

This means that there are fewer infringements to deal with and less time spent deciding what cases are worth handling. This gives you more time to grow your site, create new content and build your audience.

1. An Actual License

Much of the copyright interactions we have on the Web are governed by implied licenses, or licenses that exist when no actual license is granted. For example, one of the reasons Google is allowed to index and cache Web pages is because, according to the courts, by putting your content on the Web you are giving them an implied license to do so.

Though implied licenses can be good things, they can also be bad. Since it is hard to know what an implied license grants until a court rules on it, there is always a great deal of uncertainty. This has spilled over into areas such as RSS scraping.

However, implied licenses can be trumped by actual license. Providing a real license to use your content and making the terms of use clear, makes it so that there is no need for an implied one. As such, giving your content a true license makes good sense.

Granted, this can be done with any license, not just a CC one, but CC ones are lawyer-written and have been tested in at least one court internationally. If you can’t afford a lawyer to write you a license and are not comfortable doing it yourself, a CC license is a good way to get a well-written and reviewed license for free.

Conclusions

There are many reasons to consider a CC license for your site (and more than a few reasons to not want one as well). Every Webmaster has to make the choice that is right for them and it is rarely an easy decision.

That being said, there are a lot of benefits of CC licenses that aren’t heavily advertised. Though it does its stated mission of providing “free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry,” what it makes less clear is how marking a work with those freedoms can benefit the original author.

In the end, Creative Commons is really about a symbiosis. Creators giving up certain rights and getting other benefits in return. Though, for many, licensing one’s work under a CC license is a selfless act, it can actually provide a great deal of benefit.

Simply put, sometimes the best way to make your content work for you, is to give it a little freedom to roam.

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Without deep linking, social news would likely not exist, many Web 2.0 services (such as Delicious) would have to close and even Google would have to drastically change the way it operates. The Web would, almost overnight, become a much more difficult to use and less efficient place.

However, a recent lawsuit filed by GateHouse media has asked new questions about deep linking and its possible legal implications.

Though the lawsuit is clearly misguided in some ways, including the claim that the site loses advertising over deep linking, it is worth taking a quick moment to look at some of the potential legal hazards that come with deep linking and how to avoid them.

Copyright

Most of the copyright issues raised by deep linking come not from linking to sites, but from linking to material that is known to be infringing. Though the DMCA has protections for “information location tools” that unwittingly link to infringing material, the protections for knowingly doing so are much less clear and, as the Project Playlist case reveals, there is much to be sorted out.

That being said, there have been cases where linking directly to content has been ruled an infringement. For example a court in Texas ruled that a Supercross site had infringed another company’s rights by linking directly to their streams. This was a very controversial ruling, in particular with William Patry, the senior copyright council for Google, who called it a “deeply disturbing” case on his personal blog.

The good news is that, generally speaking, it is almost unheard for for one to be successfully sued for simply linking to a Web page and fair use, in the United States at least, even protects your right to sample the article that you are linking to.

However, deep linking copyright disputes have been increasingly rare on the Web. The reason is that most people are simply happy to have others link to their site, which specific page being an unimportant question. When one looks at the deep linking controversies of the past, it is clear that most are well over 5 years old.

For the most part, linking to a site, whether the home page or the article, is not likely to raise any copyright issues. Linking to media files are trickier, especially if you know that it is likely infringing, but also not immediate grounds for a copyright claim.

However, there are other issues that may create problems.

Bandwith/Hotlinking

Hotlinking images and media without permission is well known to be bad form on the Web. Most people think that it is disrespectful to use other people’s bandwidth to fill their own pages. That being said, whether it raises any legal issues is tough to say. Since no copy of the image or file is made nor is it made any more “public”, there is not likely a copyright infringement and other legal analogies, such as trespass to chattels, have flaws (PDF).

The real problem with hotlinking images and media files, from a practical standpoint, is that the owner of the site can remove, move or alter the files as they wish. This can cause dead links or, as the McCain campaign found, a great deal of embarrassment.

It is best to avoid hotlinking images, not only is it bad form and upsets many Webmasters, it is unreliable and causes tension. For the most part, you’ll be better off putting the content on a server that you control.

Trademark

One of the more difficult and confusing issues with linking is trademark law. Trademark law is designed to prevent confusion in the marketplace and give people control over their business and product identities. This includes names, logos and other things that can make up a trademark.

The problem with linking is that it is a violation of trademark law to claim that you have a relationship with a person or company when you do not. If you link in such a way that it appears the party involves endorses your site or is a part of it, there could be problems.

Linking to an article in a blog entry is not likely to raise any eyebrows but, as with the GateHouse case above, if you keep an ongoing stream based on the site’s RSS feed and make it appear that their content it part of your site, there is a chance that others might become confused and that could upset trademark holders.

This problem is compounded by a desire by most sites to be clearly attributed for their contributions and other sites that even create widgets designed to encourage just such linking.

To make matters worse, what would and would not constitute copyright infringement is defined very much on a case-by-case basis. Though few trademark holders seem to object to their name being associated with their links, it is a rare situation where providing attribution and doing what is right can cause legal trouble, especially when dealing with an overzealous rightsholder.

The best thing you can do is attribute correctly but make it clear what content is and is not directly affiliated with your site. It may not provide perfect protection, but it is important to keep in mind, especially if you want to make links to someone’s sites a regular part of your presence.

Conclusions

For the most part, deep linking is safe. Linking directly to stories and even most media, including images, is perfectly fine. However, embedding such images into your site directly without permission can lead to other issues, especially if the site you’re hotlinking from does not appreciate your use.

Sites such as Google, Digg and Reddit provide excellent guides for linking policies and for using content in a fair way when providing such links.

For the most part, these sites have held up very well both in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Though they certainly shouldn’t be treated as the final authority in this area, they are good starting points for anyone seeking out a role model.

In the end, the good news is that deep linking itself is not in any serious trouble. The legal questions from the beginning of the decade have not been resurrected. Instead, most of the issues we’re looking at now deal with specific cases that deal with relatively new issues.

Hopefully they will be resolved soon, making way for even greater clarity in this area.

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Now that more than a year has passed since the original articles, it seems like a good time to go back and see what has happened with those cases where, they sit right now and where they are likely heading.

X17 v. Perez Hilton

In this case, Perez Hilton, a well-known gossip blogger and columnist, was sued by the paparazzi photograph agency for illegally using their photos on his blog. In the initial article, it was noted that Hilton routinely took photos from their library, drew pictures on them and posted them to his site. This case had the potential to impact any blogger that uses images from others on their site.

Update: Shortly after the original post went up, Hilton and X17 reached a settlement in the case, the terms of which have not been disclosed. With no court ruling, there is no impact nor any clarification on the law in this particular area.

Since the settlement terms have not been disclosed, it is difficult to declare a “winner” or a “loser” though it is worth noting that X17’s images are no longer displayed on Hilton’s site.

Citizen Medial Law Project Page

Universal Music v. Lenz

Lenz is a mother who took a short 30-second video of her toddler dancing to the beat of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”. The clip, originally intended for just friends and family, found national attention when Universal Music filed a DMCA notice against Lenz. Lenz filed a counternotice to have the video put back and filed a lawsuit claiming that the video should not have been taken down at all.

As discussed in the original article on the case, there were many questions raised by the lawsuit, the first of which being fair use of using music in videos and the exact nature of what constitutes, and possibly what reprimands can be claimed against, a false takedown notice.

Update: The Case is ongoing as of this writing. in August, Lenz won a major victory when the judge refused to dismiss her claim saying that copyright holders had to consider fair use before issuing takedown notices. This case is still ongoing and, given the nature of the matter, will likely spell well into the middle part of 2009 at least.

Citizen Medial Law Project Page

Viacom v. YouTube (Google)

Viacom, the owner of several prominent television channels, sued YouTube’s parent company Google for copyright infringement claiming that the site, which allows users to upload clips, had violated their rights and were not in compliance, or at least protected, by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In the original article, it was discussed how the case could answer a large number of questions about the types of sites that are protected by the DMCA, since many of the new technologies were created after the DMCA was passed in 1998 and there are many legal uncertainties for sites such as YouTube.

Update: The case, unfortunately, is far from settled. In July the court ordered YouTube to turn over its user logs to Viacom, a move that raised privacy concerns. Beyond that, little else has happend of importance.

The biggest news comes from an unrelated case in which Veoh, a similar video sharing site, triumphed over a pornography distributor and was ruled to enjoy DMCA protection, even though the site encodes videos into Flash.

Though the case is still very much alive, it appears that the news favors YouTube significantly.

Citizen Medial Law Project Page

Coton v. TVX Films

When Lara Jade Coton was 14, she took a photo of herself wearing a top hat and sitting in a window. Four years later, she was stunned to find her photo on the cover of a pornographic DVD entitled “Body Magic”. Coton, who was from England, sought help in resolving the mater but a Tampa-area attorney, Richard Harrison, stepped up and filed suit on her behalf.

As the original article discussed, the case delved into questions about how effectively photographers and other artists could protect their works from commercial use. It also dealt heavily with jurisdictional issues as the media company involved, TVX Films, is Houston-based, not Tampa.

Update: This case was more difficult than others to get information on. There is no Citizen Medial Law Project page on this case and information since the filing has been scarce. I have been able to look up the ongoing paperwork filed in the case and see that it remains very active. The case seems to be mired in discovery related issues though the jurisdictional ones do not seem to have played as big of a role as I predicted.

This case is still very much a “live” one with little resolved and there were filings as late as the 8th. I will report more when it comes in.

MGM v. Grokster

Many, understandably, felt that the Grokster case was resolved after the Supreme Court decision in 2005. However, the ruling, which found that Grokster could be held liable for the infringements that took place by those that used their software. It did not determine what damages could be awarded, what would constitute reasonable protections by such a service among other questions. So, the case went back to the district court where StreamCast, one of the defendants in the case, is fighting on.

As discussed in the original article, the issues of damages, irreparable harm and what form an injunction should take remain unanswered and are very critical for copyright holders to be aware of moving forward.

Update: Shortly after the original article was written (all five were written in early October, about the same time), the judge in the case granted the injunction against Streamcast saying that the service had to “use the most effective means available to reduce the infringing capabilities of the Morpheus System and Software.”

This has clear impact on sites such as YouTube, which have since added such filtering technologies to their site in a bid to head off a similar negative ruling.

EFF Page

Conclusions

Of the five cases, one is settled, three are ongoing and one saw a court ruling. It was a busy year for copyright law though it appears that 2009 has the potential to be an even more important one.

If there is one thing that is certain about copyright law looking toward the new year, even with the RIAA’s announced plan to stop the bulk lawsuits, it is that there will be no shortage of rulings and new copyright conflicts taking place.

2009 is going to be an interesting year.

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The question though is how to do it? Anyone with an email address is acutely aware of the high levels of email spam still being spent out, well after Bill Gates promised the problem would be solved, and don’t seek to invite any more of it or have legitimate mail lost in existing spam filters.

Bloggers that want to invite email communication have a serious challenge trying to open the doors to their readers without inviting a deluge of pharmaceutical and scam emails as well. There are techniques that can reduce the problem, but no perfect solutions. Instead, one has to find the answer that works best for them

Mailto: The Classic Link

The first and, in many circles, most popular system is to simply include an “mailto” link to their email address. All it requires is some basic HTML knowledge, a simple link and users can click the link to pull up their favorite email client and send the email. Bloggers can even add a subject line to help with spam filtering.

However, the drawback to the system is that mailto links are routinely harvested by email spam bots. This puts the email address in “clear text” making it easy to read. Unless you obfuscate the email address with JavaScript, which makes it invisible to browsers that have scripting disabled, spammers are free to grab your address at well.

Furthermore, such links also have unpredictable results. Browsers are supposed to open up the default email client but what that entails depends on the user. Though it is possible to set up your Gmail or other Webmail as a default email client, it is possible that users will have other programs, such as Microsoft Outlook, open up instead. Meaning that the outcome is useless to them.

Despite the drawbacks, this method remains very popular with bloggers due to both its simplicity to implement and familiarity with most readers. Though far from the perfect solution, it is still one of the best.

Contact Forms

In a bid to make sending an email even easier, many sites have begun using contact forms that not only eliminate the need for a visitor to open up their mail client, but also reduce the amount of spam that gets received. These forms can also be used to help organize large volumes of email by getting users to select their reason for contacting and ensure that visitors include all needed information.

However, these forms themselves often become contact for spammers, especially those that are the same across many sites as spam bots can automatically fill out and submit these forms in many cases. Since it is impossible to tell the difference between a spammer that filled out a form and a visitor, this spam almost always gets through.

This has made it necessary for many sites to add CAPTCHAs and other anti-spam measures that can frustrate users as well as spammers.

Also, contact forms are difficult to set up and require using third-party services to put them on most hosted blog platforms. Though you you can install plugins to run the form in most self-hosted WordPress installations, finding one for a wordpress.com site is trickier.

Your use for this technique largely depends on your hosting situation and the types of contact you want to receive.

Image Obfuscation

Another common solution is to take the email address, place it into an image and then post the image to the site, often with a JavaScript-based mailto link. Since spammer bots can’t read the image, this prevents spammers from grabbing the address while allowing human visitors to proceed and email.

Unfortunately, this method comes with its own set of problems. First, it places an extra burden on the visitor, making them hand-type the address rather than merely copying it, and it also puts the email address out of the reach of those who are visually impaired and rely upon screen readers to use.

As a result, this method typically is used as a supplemental method. For example, it can be used to give out the email address in conjunction with a contact form, so that those who prefer to not use a form have another option.

Other Ideas

There are still other methods for including contact information in a blog. Consider the following:

1. Forgoing Email: One increasingly common solution is to forgo email altogether and, instead, focus on other methods of interaction including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. Many prefer these methods of contact as they have both a public and a private face.
2. Address Munging: This involves creating a plain text version of the email address but adding text to it that a human would know to remove. An example would be mynameNOSPAM@mydomain.REMOVE.com. Though such methods do hinder spammers, they also result in users, who often forget to remove the added text, having their email bounced back.
3. Disposable Addresses: Another technique involves keeping the email address in plain sight, but changing it regularly, such as having example2008@yourdomain.com and switching it to example2009@yourdomain.com after the year ends. This method makes it hard to build up a reputation and can confuse those you correspond with unless you make the transition very clear.

In short, there are as many ways of addressing this issue as there are sites on the Web, but no system appears to have the perfect answer to the problem.

Always Good Ideas

With that being said, there are several steps that are always good ideas, no matter what email contact system one chooses.

1. Good Anti-Spam Filters: Having a good anti-spam filter on your email client or Webmail can go a long way to reducing the amount of spam that you get. Gmail, for example, has a solid reputation for good spam filtering.
2. Use Multiple Accounts: Having separate accounts for email newsletters and site registrations, which are likely to attract more spam, also helps reduce the volume of junk received in the primary account.
3. Don’t Respond to Spam: Finally, though almost everyone should be aware of this, one should never respond to email spam, even if it is to ask to be removed. Replying only confirms that a human reads the account, thus increasing the amount of spam targeted at it.

If you follow these steps, most likely the need for anti-spam measures on your site will be greatly reduced, if not removed completely.

Bottom Line

Webmasters, with their email accounts, have to play a delicate balancing act where they expose their information to those that might have legitimate need for it, while keeping it as far out of reach of the spammers as possible. Unfortunately, no method is perfect and there are no right answers on how to do this.

Still, it is just one additional headache, along with comment spammers, scrapers and domain squatters, that bloggers have to deal with.

Also like these other issues, though there are ways to lessen the problem, there are none to make it go away completely.

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Though I did not see any widespread copying of content on the links that I checked (example), it appears that the amount of content copied in the snippet is determined by the user posting the link, not the site.

Still, it is clear that there has to be a balancing act between social media and content creators. Though social news sites need to use some of the content and conversation from the blog in order to properly function, if they take too much, there is nothing left to encourage content creators to participate or permit their works to be used.

Finding this balance is tricky and has been a problem that has plagued social news sites since the beginning. Many sites have faced criticism for “scraping content” or “fragmenting the conversation” and the concern remains at the top of mind of many Webmasters, especially when dealing with new social news sites that do not drive significant traffic.

So how should social news behave? The last is not very clear but the standards on the Web seem to have spoken to at least some degree.

Content and Copying

When it comes to how much content a social news site should reuse, the most popular sites currently, Digg and Reddit, actually set very good standards. Digg, for example, includes a short description with every submission. That submission can come from content from the site itself or can be custom-written by the submitter.

Likewise, Reddit does not provide any description at all, just a headline, which serves as the link to the article, and the domain the link is hosted on, nothing more. It is up to the submitter to ensure that the headline is descriptive and interesting enough to make people click through.

This system of limited content dates back to many of the earliest social news-style sites, including Slashdot and Fark, which resemble Digg and Reddit respectively in how they use content from source pages.

In the end, it seems that most social news sites, especially the successful ones, are stingy with the amount of copied content they allow and quick to link out. This not only helps Webmasters benefit from these sites and encourage their active participation, but also declutters the site itself, putting the focus on other aspects, especially the conversation.

Fragmenting the Conversation

The one thing that all four of the sites mentioned above does that might upset bloggers is that they all provide their own comment threads. In fact, on all of these social news sites above, the conversation is the centerpiece of the site as much as is the content.

Many have expressed concern that this fragments the conversation and makes it so that visitors are unsure about where to leave their feedback. Since most blogs provide comments of their own, bloggers clearly have a desire to have their visitors start a conversation there and not on other sites.

Typically, when an article hits the front page of Digg, Reddit or similar sites, the social news site will see hundreds of comments about the article but the original site only a few, if any.

Legally, however, there is little one can do about a fragmented conversation. Though copyright law protects what you right from being excessively copied and pasted elsewhere, it does not prevent others from talking about what you’ve created.

However, according to social Web strategist Liz Strauss, this is not always a bad thing and has always been a part of history, “Life itself can fragment conversations. We sometimes forget that. We often expect more of our conversations online than of what happens in the offline world.”

Liz goes on to say that she, “Keep(s) track of important thoughts using BackType and Twitter in tandem as I’ve seen others do. Sometimes, I’ll send a friend a Twitter that I’ve answered their comment with a link back. And I’ll read BackType to know when they’ve done the same.”

Of course, on the Web, conversations have always been fragmented, including well before social news. Forums used to be important places for discussing new links and, as Strauss pointed out, long before even the Internet people discussed what they saw or read at their office, with friends or elsewhere.

If anything, the Internet is unique in that it lets authors and creators host a conversation, not in that it fragments the conversation.

Personally, I make it my policy to respond to all comments on the original sites I post, be it here or on my other sites, and may respond elsewhere if I learn about it and feel it appropriate. The goal is to make it so that, if people want to discuss what I wrote with me, they know where to do it, but they are free to talk about it elsewhere with others if they wish and I will do my best to follow that conversation as it happens.

Bottom Line

Social media is a partnership between the new sites/services and the Webmasters that create the content. When the partnership goes well, bloggers and content creators have a powerful avenue to promote themselves and their work and social news sites become powerful hubs for information, when the balance is off, content creators feel ripped off and rebel against the service, causing them to not promote the site and, in some cases, actively work to have their content removed.

For both to be successful, there must be some give and take. Bloggers can not expect social news to be little more than a funnel of traffic to their site, and social news can not attempt to replace the role of the original site.

The goal of social news is to promote good work. To do that, it needs both good content to promote and the ability to do so. Social news sites will live and die by the quality of the content they promote and the conversation they host, making it important for both sides to understand their limitations.

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This has some photographers, bloggers and artists uneasy about using Flickr or at least using the site exclusively. Many have begun seeking alternatives to Flickr but alternatives seem to be thin. Though image hosts such as Photobucket exist and are great for embedding images into other sites, they lack the sense of community that Flickr provides and, in the case of Photobucket, can raise copyright issues of their own.

So what other sites are there for photographers and artists that might fulfill some or all of Flickr’s function while providing a slightly better copyright environment? There are actually many, but here are three of the more important ones to watch.

PhoTrade

Photrade is a different kind of image hosting site. Rather than simply being a host for images, Photrade works more like a partnership between the photographer. Photrade offers prints, t-shirts, licenses and other items for sale, but, unlikes Photobucket or Flickr, it shares the revenues with its customers.

Photrade also offers a great deal of protection of the image, including the ability to ad a custom watermark over the image, privacy settings and more. Also, as with Flickr, you can embed the images into your site but, unlike Flickr, you have the option of earning ad revenue off of ads that run next to it (you can switch ads off during the embedding process if you wish).

Though Photrade’s community is nowhere near the size of Flickr, it is growing and is very tight-knit. All in all, Photrade is a logical choice for professional photographers and artists looking for a means to earn revenue from their images and want near-total control about how it is used.

It combines the best of most existing photo sharing sites with CafePress and other print on demand services.

deviantArt

DeviantArt has a reputation of being a less-professional image/art sharing site. However, it has many powerful tools that help to make it a contender for many photographers.

Like Photrade, deviantArt allows artists to sell prints of their work and receive revenue. It also has a watermarking system, though not one as robust as Photrade, and the ability to add additional licensing information, including Creative Commons, and upload information regarding a model release or permissions acquired.

deviantArt has a very robust community that is known to be very rabid about protecting their rights, even organizing groups to help patrol the Web looking for potential rips. The downside of deviantArt is that it has a very limited embedding ability, only working with a small handful of sites (though one could, theoretically, copy and paste the HTML elsewhere).

For the most part, dA is a self-contained, though very robust, community that offers a great deal of protection over one’s work and even preserves the metadata on the full-sized images.

SmugMug

Where Flickr and most photo sharing sites encourage everyone to join and participate, SmugMug is much more exclusive. The accounts on the site are for pay only, though there is a free trial period, andthe accounts can get relatively pricey, up to $150 per year for the highest level.

What SmugMug offers for that price is a clean user experience with beautiful galleries and zero advertisements as well as high levels of customization and usability. Also, at its highest account level, it offers a similar set of sales features as well as watermarking and other image protection tools.

Though metadata does not transfer on many of the embeddable images, which can be quite large, they do carry over on the original images. Likewise, they provide a standard set of privacy functions as well as the ability to limit the size of the embeddable/viewable images.

Though the pricing likely puts SmugMug out of the reach of the amateur photographer, professionals may be drawn to its simplicity, branding and flexibility. For those worried that Flickr may be too “open” and don’t want or need the very large community, it could be a good choice.

Conclusions

For most photographers, even with its flaws, Flickr is just fine. As long as one is careful about how they use Flickr and are aware of the concerns and potential problems, Flickr works great. With some preparation and forethought, it can still be a great service. I use it myself for my personal photos.

Still, there are some photographers, especially professional ones, that are more leery of these issues and want to better protect their work. Though it is almost impossible to beat the community that Flickr has built and the promotion it can provide, some, at least, are uncomfortable with the trade offs.

If you are one of those photographers, there are plenty of other image hosting/sharing sites out there that may be better suited for you. The three above are just a few examples.

Search around the net and, if you know of any others, feel free to leave a comment and let me (and everyone else) know.

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But what is clear is that tools like WordPress Direct are becoming more and more common. Part of the double-edged nature of open source development is that, while most will use the license to extend the product in healthy ways, a few will do so in ways that can be used for unethical purpose. Though this is not an argument against open source, more and more tools like WordPress Direct have sprung up, often charging high monthly fees for “maintenance free” blogging.

But what does WordPress Direct do and is it a spam tool? The answer is complicated and made more so by the fact that the nature of spam and even the definition of spam is a moving target. However, it is clear that WordPress Direct, along with similar products, have a lot of potentially dangerous uses and, if its marketing is any indication, those uses are very much by design.

Multiple Uses, Multiple Faces

First and foremost, WordPress Direct is a WordPress installer, making it easy to set up WordPress installations on either your own server or theirs. There is no need to setup databases, install the core files or even fix permalinks and add a theme. The system does that for you.

However, applications that install WordPress are already extremely common. Though most don’t help optimize the installation, most hosts have some variation of the WordPress “One Click” install, often using Fantastico. Furthermore, such installs are usually more up to date, with WordPress Direct saying that they still use the 2.5.x branch of WordPress.

But what has drawn the most controversy is not the installation, but rather, the tools that come with it. WordPress Direct also installs a series of tools that let you import content directly into your feed, including from Yahoo! Answers, YouTube and even other RSS feeds.

Though the WordPress Direct team is quick to tout that the owner of the created blogs is the editor, the truth is that all of the tools can be set to publish automatically, meaning that content is scraped from various sources and republished without any editing or manipulation. Combined with the easy insertion of Adsense advertisements into the blog itself, it is easy to see how one could create dozens of spam blogs very quickly with this tool.

That, in turn, is what has many bloggers very worried.

WordPressDirect Responds

In a comment to the original Mashable article, Marty Rozmanith, a representative for the company said that:

“Those that do (repost content) realize all content requires proper attribution, and our service facilitates that. It also facilitates reviewing content before posting so that spam videos and such do not end up on your blog.

We do not host the bulk of our user’s blogs – they do. If they get themselves in trouble with spamming their own blog, we frown upon it and it usually results to their detriment anyway.”

He goes on to say that:

“For all the content creators reading this — unless you post your content to a ‘user-generated’ content site like YouTube or an ezine article service, our service will never find it. We do not scrape random sites to find content. We use APIs provided to republish content the way those sites intend us to. We automate the embedding that they provide and that bloggers do manually every day.”

However, during my very brief testing of the software, I noticed that much of this appears to be at least somewhat inaccurate.

First, the test “blog” I created pulled content from Yahoo Answers but there was no indication that the content came from there nor was a link back to the source provided. Furthermore, the original question was posted as the blog entry with the replies posted as comments, furthering the confusion. I could not find a way to turn on attribution. (Note: I have already deleted this blog as I did not wish it to be indexed by the search engines.)

Second, though they claim to only pull content from “user generated” sites, their marketing material provides information about how to pull from RSS feeds and, in my testing, it is very easy to do. Any blog, regardless of how it was licensed, can be reused by these sites should the operator decide to pull from it.

Finally, though it is possible to see how one could use this to automatically locate videos and related articles, there are other services that provide this functionality already. Furthermore, to use this tool for such a legitimate purpose would require a great deal of editing and crafting (EX: Pull quotes from articles, add links, etc.) and the automation would save little time.

All in all, most of those that wanted to use this service for non-spamming aims would likely find other tools better suited to what they want to do.

The Good News

The good news is that this is also likely a very poor spam tool. The highest level of membership, which costs nearly $150 per month, only allows users to create 100 sites. That number is fairly tame in terms of spam blog network size and, by requiring each spam blog return over $1 per month in profit, it is debatable how much revenue could be generated. Other tools allow the creation of many times this number of sites at much lower costs.

All in all, compared to other, better-known tools, I don’t think bloggers have much to fear from this service. In addition to the limited network size, adding RSS feeds is a manual process and is very time consuming compared to the other input methods.

Though WordPress Direct’s best uses are spam-related, it is hardly the hardcore spamming tool that bloggers have been taught to fear.

Conclusions

I always find the marketing of products like WordPress Direct to be very interesting. On its front page, the site promises you that it “scours the internet for topic-specific video, audio and article content and automatically combines it on your site to create a truly unique visitor experience,” and that all you have to do is “Simply click a few buttons and WordPress Direct will update your site as often or as rarely as you’d like.”

Most bloggers would instantly recognize this as too good to be true but it is how many spam blog applications, both admitted and not, advertise their wares.

The question is whether WordPress Direct is a legitimate tool that has significant questionable use or a questionable tool that has some limited legitimate use. Though it is always difficult to tell, the marketing clearly seems to bill it as the latter.

However, in his comment, Rozmanith said that “It’s true the sales material tries to make everything look ‘effortless.’ We should update it – it is not a true reflection apparently.” Perhaps this is an indication that he understands the message his marketing is getting and why others, including myself, feel as they do about the product.

But even without the marketing, the tool itself still has a bevy of questionable uses and controversial decisions. Whether this is by design or a mistake is a question only the creators can answer.

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Even though the copyright element of the claim is questionable, especially considering that you can not copyright facts, including prices, it is clear that the holidays can introduce a new set of copyright hazards for bloggers and other Webmasters.

So, as we rapidly approach the holiday season, here are five of the biggest copyright hazards that you may need to watch out for as you celebrate the season online.

Songs

It is common during the holidays to use Christmas and other songs as part of videos or other presentations. However, much of the content in those songs is copyrighted.

Even if the composition is in the public domain, the modern recording likely is not. So, where there is nothing to stop you from singing and making your own recording of “Ode to Joy”, the performances of others may be protected still. Also, modern adaptations of classic songs, such as “Jingle Bell Rock” likely have elements that are copyright protected.

Though disputes over holiday music are relatively rare, especially when compared to ones over major artists, they can arise. Typically, it is better to be safe than sorry.

How to Avoid Issues: To avoid potential problems, find music that is properly licensed for the use you want to use and/or stick to your own versions of songs within the public domain. Also, you can consider severely limiting your use an trying to make a strong fair use argument for your copying.

Ads

As the sites listed above have found, many stores are very protective of their advertisements, especially before they are released.

Though copyright law does not protect against the repeating of facts or information (though it could be a breach of trade secret), it does protect against displaying the expression of that information. While you might be able to display information from the ad, scanning and reposting the advertisement, especially before it has been released to the public, is very dangerous.

No matter how crazy it seems to go after people that help distribute an advertisement to those who might not have seen it, do not forget that both TV commercials and music videos are routinely pulled of YouTube though they serve the same function.

Right or wrong, it is the company’s decision to determine how their advertisements are displayed.

How to Avoid Issues: Stick to retelling the facts from the advertisement and not using the ad itself if possible. Also, pay attention to how the companies react as many will likely tolerate the reprinting of their ads. Also, to be completely safe, do not republish anything from the ads before they are released to the public as it may, arguably, run afoul of trade secret law.

Images

As with virtually any other type of image, holiday images, including drawings of Santa Claus, etc. are likely protected by copyright. Though it may be tempting to line a holiday post with images from the season, most likely such images would be protected under copyright and subject to the same rules.

Though, as with most things common to the holidays, the basis of the image, including the scenes and characters, concepts are well into the public domain, the recent expressions of those ideas are still protected. Nothing could stop you from making your own drawing of Santa Claus, but by using someone else’s could, possibly, be a cause for action.

Fortunately, in this area, there is a wealth of material that is in the public domain (paintings, sculptures, etc.) that may work well.

How to Avoid Issues: With images in posts, you can likely limit your use and build a strong fair use case. Though that won’t protect you from a conflict, it can protect you from damages. The safer solution though is to use your own images or limit yourself to public domain or licensed works. You should be able to find either fairly trivially.

Parodies

The holidays seem to bring out more than the season of giving, but also the season of parodies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of parodies of most famous Christmas songs that range from the tame to the very adult.

Fortunately, parodies, in the United States, are a very well protected form of expression. So long as the parody attempts to poke fun at the original work or its subject and is not an attempt to replace it, parodies are generally acceptable. However, parody use is still run through the typical four factors for fair use analysis so it is important to think of it in those terms and some parodies, such as “The Cat is Not in the Hat” have been stifled on copyright claims.

For the most part, so long as your parody offers commentary or criticism on the same subject of the original work, in this case the season, it will likely have a good chance of surviving. However, fair use questions are always difficult to resolve and are notably unpredictable.

The safest route is to parody items that are in the public domain, which includes many of the most popular holiday works.

How to Avoid Issues: Make sure that your parodies are within the bounds of fair use or, if you want extra protection, limit your lampooning to works in the public domain. In truth, there are very few lawsuits over parodies for a variety of reasons, but they can and do happen.

Home Videos

The one thing that is almost universal this time of year is the use of personal video cameras to capture videos and record memories. It is a cherished family tradition and, in the age of YouTube, those memories can easily be shared with family members or the world.

However, it is not uncommon when shooting video to also grab copyrighted items, from a television playing the room to a song playing in the background. As the Lenz case proved, those uses, when combined with extremely sensitive filtering and detection tools, can lead to serious copyright conflicts.

Fortunately, also as the Lenz case showed, those incidental captures of copyrighted bits are, for the most part, protected under fair use. Since, most likely, the amount of content used will be extremely trivial and unlikely to damage the copyrighted work at all, such use is not likely to raise any serious copyright issue.

This remains a situation where it is more important to be aware of the fingerprinting and other tools that video sharing sites, as well as copyright holders, use to detect infringing works. These videos could be held for further review or be the subject of takedown notices. It is best to be prepared.

How to Avoid Issues: Be mindful of copyright issues as you shoot your videos and, if you have something you think may cause trouble, do not post that portion on the Web. Even if you are protected under fair use, fingerprinting technology may artificially flag you as infringing. Understand your rights under the DMCA (or other applicable laws) and be prepared for at least the remote possibility.

Conclusions

Though it is depressing to think of copyright and other intellectual property issues at this time of year, there is nothing more depressing or ruinous to the season than being hit with a takedown notice, a nastygram or even a lawsuit.

Fortunately though, serious copyright disputes surrounding the holidays are fairly rare. Not only is much of the material involved well into the public domain, but the spirit of the season seems to make even the staunchest of copyright holders a little bit more lenient.

Still, it is best not to rely on the generosity of the season. There are more than a few grinches that would love nothing more than to ruin the Christmas season for those that cross their copyrights.

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Though disputes over negative reviews are common, what makes this one unique is allegations that the negative reviews were a form of retribution for an advertising arrangement that ended. In a ruling handed down last month, judge Jennifer Togliatti agreed and awarded the golf course and its owner, Billy Walters, a $9 million award for defamation.

Even as Pay-Per-Post and similar paid-review sites take a drumming in the blogging world, it is easy to forget that the concept of paid reviews are nothing new as is its sibling, review extortion, where the writer threatens to pen negative reviews of a service unless they are paid a certain amount of money.

However, where pay-per-review services are primarily an ethical issue for most bloggers, review extortion also raises serious legal problems, as the Lewis case points out, and is something that bloggers need to be aware of and avoid.

Background

According to reports in the Lewis case, Lewis and Walters had an advertising relationship for about two years prior to February 2005. The deal was for Lewis to provide referrals through the various sites in his network using both reviews and advertisements.

However, sometime before the contract had expired, the relationship soured and Lewis demanded nearly three times the amount to continue it. When Walters declined to renew the contract, the tone of the reviews seemed to change quickly.

Where reviews had been glowing prior to the expiration of the deal, saying things such as “The views are magnificent with Sunrise Mountain supplying the backdrop,” they become much more hostile afterward, including the quip “And you thought the Exorcist was scary?” included in a May 2005 review.

According to Lewis, he had been receiving negative letters about Walters’ courses when they were partners but, since Walters was a sponsor of the site, they withheld the letters. At some point, they changed their policy and decided to publish all the letters. Also, according to Lewis, the blogs in question began after the partnership ended.

After a three and a half year legal battle, the judge came down on Walters’ side awarding him the $9 million in damages, casting serious doubt about the future of Travel Golf Media. However, the case provides a valuable lesson about bloggers as to why they should be careful what they say online and why they say it.

Shake Down Journalism

The kind of reporting Lewis is accused of is sometimes referred to ask “Shake Down Journalism” It is where journalists, in exchange for an advertising arrangement or some sort of financial gain, withhold negative reviews or information.

On blogs, this could be anything from censoring negative comments to, as in this case, threatening to post negative reviews. Since the Internet can hold incredible sway with potential buyers, especially of big-ticket items (vacations, cars, etc.) such negative feedback can severely hurt a business. As more and more people use Google for their research, Web journalists will have more and more influence over purchases.

However, bloggers have a great deal of protection when posting their thoughts on goods and services. Not only does the Section 230 Communications Decency Act provides bloggers with protection against defamation suits due to comments or guest blog posts, but defamation law in general protects your right to express your opinions, it is only statements that are provably false that may raise defamation issues.

Despite this, defamation and other legal issues can arise against bloggers that use negative reviews as a form of revenge or retribution for some unrelated activity. It is acceptable to post a negative review of your cell phone company if you feel they provide bad service, but not because they didn’t advertise on your site.

Though cases such as this one are very rare, it is still a legal pitfall bloggers need to be aware of and one that, as the Lewis case has shown, can be very costly.

Conclusions

All in all, it comes down to respect and common sense. Most of the legal problems on the Web can be avoided completely by treating others with respect and thinking about what you are doing. It is really that simple.

For the most part, the law was written for situations were common decency and mutual cooperation breaks down and people can not resolve their own differences without some kind of mediation. Those situations are fortunately very rare and almost never arise so long as people follow common decency.

In short, if you’re a good member of the Web community, you likely won’t have to worry about these issues. Though it is important to be aware of what the law says so you know your rights, for the most part, your danger of being sued, especially successfully, is minimal so long as you don’t do anything that you would not want done to you.

Be honest, be fair, be safe. It is that simple.

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Though he first retired over thirty years ago, his writings and teachings are still standard reading for college students today. Over the course of his 40-plus year career he helped create many of advertising’s most famous print ads, he founded Ogilvy and Mather, an advertising agency is still thriving today, and he wrote two books that are still relevant today.

Ogilvy was known for his laser-focused efforts on creating ads that “make the cash register ring”. Though his approach was not as “creative” as others in the field, it was very effective. His ads also tended to favor longer body copy, including at least one ad that contained some 10,000 words. In fact, Ogilvy’s first book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man” was originally written as a lengthy piece of direct marketing, mailed out to prospective clients.

Though Ogilvy died in 1999, he left behind a powerful legacy and one that any writer, no matter the field, can glean something from. Even today, in the age of the Internet, his philosophies, Ogivlyisms and rules remain just as effective today as they did forty years ago.

What are some tips Ogilvy has to teach bloggers, here is just a sample.

7. Focus on Your Headline

Headline writing, or title writing for bloggers, is a crucial and undervalued art. A good headline should pull readers into an article make them want to invest the time to see what is inside. However, at the same time, it should give as much pertinent information as practical because many times more people will read the headline than the body copy. The best headlines will convey the information that the reader needs to know, while encouraging them to read deeper into the work, something that is not easy to do in under ten words.

David Ogilvy’s most famous headline was in an advertisement for Rolls Royce “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”. It is a headline proudly featured in his books and often studied by advertising students.

6. Subheads are Important Too

If you have a lot of copy, it is important to break it up regularly with subheads. Subheads make a longer work more “skimmable”, letting people quickly get the overall idea of what is inside and they also make it easier for those reading the full work by giving them breaks. It also makes the copy less intimidating to read by making it seem shorter than it actually is.

5. Include Captions with Photos

This is something even I don’t do very often. However, photo captions are many times more likely to be read than body copy so it makes sense, if you include images, to include captions with them. Ideally, a caption should be descriptive of the photograph but should also further the message of the larger work.

4. Write to Your Target Audience

When writing it is important to determine who your target audience is and write toward them. When possible you should use the language, terminology and writing patterns typical of those you are trying to reach. If you are writing to journalists, write in a journalistic style, if you’re targeting engineers, write like an engineer. The goal is to have your writing seem familiar to your target group and create a connection with them.

3. If You Don’t Have a Lot to Say – Don’t Say a Lot

Though Ogilvy favored lengthy advertising copy and never shied away from it, he understood that not every company needed a 10,000 word diatribe to explain why their product was the best. Don’t be afraid to write a lot of copy if it is necessary, well-written copy will be read, but don’t write a lot of there isn’t much to say.

2. End With a Call To Action

The call to action is the most important part of any advertisement. Do you want people to buy your product, vote for a certain candidate, use your service or change the way they think? Without a call to action, even the best-written advertisement is a waste and the same holds true for a blog entry.

It is not enough to tell people how you feel or what you think, you have to explain why this is important to others and what you would like them to do in response to it. A call to action can be as simple as “leave a comment” or as involved as changing the way they live their lives.

Your goal isn’t just to get people to see your point of view, but to get them to take some kind of action. To have that happen, you have to spell out the change you want to see.

1. Be Informative

Passing along knowledge and information is the best way to both encourage people to read your work, whether it is an advertisement or a blog entry, but also the best way to build trust with your readers. Giving your readers valuable information is a powerful tool for making you more authoritative in your field and getting your readers to follow your advice.

Remember, one of Ogilvy’s famous sayings is that “The Consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.”

Treat your readers with respect and give them good information. Encourage them to trust you by being the best in your field and believing in your product, whether it is you, your site or something you are trying to sell.

Conclusions

To many, this may seem very basic, but the effect Ogilvy had on the advertising world was nothing but amazing.

Ogilvy taught the advertising industry how to write and, even today, his books are used as key texts in colleges. However, his lessons go well beyond just the advertising world and can help improve the writing of any one who has a message to get across.

He is a man who is well worth studying, both as an interesting character in history, and as a powerful communicator that helped revolutionize an industry. Even though not all of his lessons apply to every industry, there are still many that all of us can carry away.

For more tips on applying Ogilvy’s philosophy to blogging, check out Copyblogger.

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However, earlier this month, he suffered a setback as his site was pulled down, seemingly for no reason. According to his host, the cause was that they felt he was infringing copyright even though all of the music on his site was content he had the right to distribute, much of it his own, and no one had filed a complaint.

It was an unnecessary and extremely pro-active takedown, but it has had many other bloggers, musicians and filmmakers worried. Could their ISP do the same thing to them and, if so, what could they do about it?

Fortunately, cases such as Rosenstock’s are relatively rare and the odds of it happening to any one person are very slim. But after Rosenstock endured several days of downtime before his site was restored, it has many very nervous about the potential for disaster.

The Quote Unquote Story

According to Rosenstock, he was notified on about the tenth of the month by his ISP that he had some copyrighted music files on his server. When Rosenstock asked about the specific files, the representative named several songs written and recorded by Rosenstock himself, to which he explained they were his own files.

Rosenstock removed a few tracks by the group 311 that he was storing on the server and then moved on, thinking the matter was resolved.

However, a few days later his site was done, including all of the files. To make matters worse, his hard drive failed and his backups were gone. The only way he could retrieve much of his own music was through his host and they were demanding that he provide proof of ownership of the works before they would restore the site.

The problem was that the proof they requested was a registration form from the U.S. Copyright Office. However, Rosenstock had not registered any of his works, and there was no registration to provide. Though Rosenstock had used Poor Man’s Copyright, it does not work for proving ownership, leaving him with no means to prove he wrote and recorded his own music to his ISP.

Though he was eventually able to convince his host to restore his site, it was only after several days of downtime and a great deal of publicity. While it may work out that the attention could be a positive for the label in the long run, it was a frustrating problem for the label and they almost certainly would rather it never have happened at all.

Still, it is a very worrisome issue for artists that may not be able to attract such attention to their plight if it were to happen to them.

The Good News

The good news is that, for most Webmasters, such an event is extremely unlikely, at worst. The vast majority of Web hosts follow some sort of notice-and-takedown procedure that requires a copyright holder to file a complaint before content is removed. This means that, if you post only work you have the right to post, the odds of being shut down for copyright infringement are very slim.

Most cases where a non-infringing user is shut down on copyright grounds deals with cases where a third party files a false notice, often resulting in a lawsuit against them. Those cases, too, are relatively rare, especially for those that don’t post high-risk content, but they still outnumber overzealous hosts.

Still, if you post a great deal of multimedia content, especially MP3s, there is a possibility that you could be investigated by your Web host. Though typically such investigations do not lead to a site closure, usually they would end the content creator saying that they created the files, it is understandable that many would wish to avoid any inspection or interference from their host.

To that end, I would offer the following suggestions:

1. Avoid “Unlimited” Hosts: Unlimited hosts are a bad idea in general, but if you post a large volume of media files, you can practical guarantee that you will come under scrutiny. Not only are such hosts popular among those who wish to set up illegal sites, putting the hosts on guard, but some are known to look for reasons to disconnect sites that use large amounts of resources, since they can not simply cap bandwidth.
2. Use Established Media Hosts for Files: Media hosts such as Libsyn and Blip.tv have more experiencing hosting media and can do a better job weeding out the legitimate users from the rampant infringers. Though they can not do much for you should some actually file a takedown notice, it would prevent your site from going down, though your media links would be broken.
3. Be Smart About File Names: Though some sites, such as YouTube, have sophisticated fingerprinting techniques that can detect likely infringing material by looking at the content, most Web hosts do not have that. Many may look at your file names and make a determination based solely on that information. Be careful to use clear file names that indicate they are original files, not infringing works.

Though there is no way to completely ensure that you never face such a problem, taking these steps can go a long way to ensuring that your Web hosts doesn’t unnecessarily interfere with your business.

Conclusions

for most of us, an overzealous Web host is not likely going to be a problem. For most of the Web, the problem deals more with hosts not wanting to remove works that clearly are infringing than hosts that want to act without provocation to remove someone’s own creation for copyright infringement.

Simply put, very few Web hosts are going to risk shutting down legitimate customers unless they have some legal requirement to do so. It is not just bad business, but plain stupid.

Still, it is important to remember that working with a Web host is a partnership and that the only way to make it a lasting relationship is for both sides to work together. If you plan on hosting a large amount of your own mp3s and you are worried about this, talk to them and let them know what is going on. If they balk, move the files elsewhere.

There are countless hosts on the Web and nearly all of them will be more than happy to have your business.

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At the same time, bloggers have been striving to gain equal footing with mainstream media representatives in obtaining access to both people and events. However, they have typically had an uphill struggle in obtaining such access for reasons that are not always clear.

Though bloggers have begun to act more and more in the same capacity as the mainstream media, they have typically not had the legal training and information nor the access of journalists. Few come from mass media or law backgrounds and thus often struggle with the legal issues surrounding blogging and even fewer have the connections and knowledge to obtain critical access to important events.

This is where the Media Bloggers Association steps in. It seeks to help grow citizen journalism by providing it with some of the same training and access that journalists in newspapers or television have. The goal is to promote blogging and citizen journalism as its own form of media and give bloggers equal footing, both in the courts and on the streets, to other journalists.

Legal Assistance

Probably the most prominent feature that the MBA provides is legal assistance to bloggers. By default, this comes in three forms:

1. An Online Course: The MBA provides a free online course on media law for bloggers. The course is a requirement to anyone that wishes to become a member of the MBA but is free to any bloggers, member or otherwise, that wishes to take it. The course is fairly brief but contains much of the same information one would get in a journalism law and ethics class.
2. Legal Referral Program: Bloggers with legal issues can have the MBA refer them to a qualified attorney that can help them. This service is somewhat similar to what the EFF does in many cases.
3. Media Liability Insurance: Many journalists and news organizations have media liability insurance. Much like auto insurance helps pay for damages resulting from a car accident, legal liability insurance helps pay for damages resulting from blogging, including defamation, copyright and other types of claims common to bloggers.

Of the three methods of legal assistance, it is the latter that has received the most attention. The program, which the MBA says is the first of its kind, has many bloggers wondering whether it is something that they need to consider obtaining.

Media Liability Insurance

Media liability insurance works, in practice, very similar to auto liability insurance. If you have an auto accident where you are at fault, your insurance company generally assumes responsibility for defending you and pays any damages you incur up to your policy amount less any deductible that you have.

So, if your accident caused $10 thousand in damages and you had a $25 thousand dollar policy with a $250 deductible, your policy would pay all of the damages less $250, which would be your responsibility. Likewise, if the damages exceeded your policy amount, you would be liable for anything over that amount.

However, with media liability insurance what is covered is not car accidents, but other lawsuits that are common to bloggers. In the case of the MBA’s BlogInsure insurance (link PDF), which is provided through Media/Professional Insurance. that would include the following:

• Copyright
• Invasion of Privacy
• Defamation

Each policy covers the blogger for up to $100,000 in liability per case and $300,000 aggregate and comes with a $2,500 deductible. This means that the blogger would be responsible for the first $2,500 but then would not be responsible for any damages or expenses up to the $100,000 mark for each case. This includes legal expenses incurred defending the case.

Currently, the policy is only for those within the United States and is designed for bloggers earning less than $100,000 per year from their site. Also, it is important to note that insurance is provided on a site-by-site basis and not to the blogger him or herself. Each site must be registered and insured separately.

Is Media Liability Insurance a Good Idea?

The question many bloggers will ask is whether or not media liability insurance is a good idea for them. The answer is very complicated.

First, the pricing of the policies are unknown at this time as they are handled on a case-by-case basis. To find out how much media liability insurance would cost you, you first must become a member of the MBA and then apply for insurance.

Second, the need for such insurance varies wildly from blog to blog and case to case. Blogs that cover news, gossip or routinely posts negative information about people and companies are at a much higher risk of being sued than family blogs, hobby blogs or even tech blogs. Every blog is different and therefore its risk is different.

The simple truth though is that the vast majority of bloggers do not get sued, including those that behave irresponsibly, but the risk is definitely there and it appears to be growing. You need to honestly analyze your own site’s risk for a lawsuit and a great way to do that is to take the MBA’s free online course.

Other Services

In addition to legal assistance and help in obtaining access credentials, the MBA provides other services including conferences, awards and other services that one would typically expect from a trade organization.

Bottom Line

Overall, the MBA is not for every blogger nor is it likely for most. Though the dues of $25 per year are reasonable, most bloggers would likely have little reason to want to join a trade group.

However, those that are very serious about blogging, especially as a form of journalism, may want to seriously consider it. Even if you don’t opt for the liability insurance, the referral program can help a great deal and the other services provided by the MBA may be very compelling.

But even if you do not have any interest in joining the MBA, their online media law class is a very useful tool that virtually anyone who publishes to the Web should go through at least once. The information contained in there is invaluable when it comes to staying out of trouble on the Web.

After all, though you can never completely eliminate the risk of being sued, you can certainly go a long way to reducing the chance you’ll ever need (or wish you had) liability insurance.

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For bloggers, this is a very good deal. Not only do comments promote a sense of community, add value to the site and encourage repeat visitors, it also adds a great deal of search engine-friendly content that helps to grow the blog.

But the power of comments has caused many bloggers to be worried about what rights they have over them. What happens if a spammer begins to scrape the comment feed? What if a commenter changes his or her mind and asks for the post removed? What happens if I move to another site or service?

Unfortunately, these are not simple questions but they are important ones for bloggers to be aware of, especially since disputes over comments are happening more and more frequently.

Your Rights to Your Comments

Copyright itself is very clear. Whenever a work is fixed into a tangible medium of expression, the copyright reverts to the author of the work. The result is that, when a work is posted to your site, even though it was posted using your server, the copyright is held by the author.

This isn’t to say that the blogger has no rights over their comments. Even if nothing else is present, the mere act of the commenter posting it to the site grants an implied license for the blogger to display it and use it in the manner intended. As such, it is unlikely that a commenter would ever be successful in suing a blogger for the public display of their own comment, of course, it is also highly unlikely any would every try.

However, the fact that your commenters hold the copyright in their comments does provide several critical limitations. First, they are free to post their comments anywhere else, including on their own sites, they have the right to object to other uses of their work, meaning you can not send out takedown notices or cease and desist letters for infringement of your comments, and they have the right to request that their comments be removed.

In short, when it comes to protecting content within your comments, you have roughly the same amount of rights as you would with content posted on other blogs. Other than alerting commenters to the infringement and helping them take action, there is not much that you can do.

Though you can take steps on your server side, such as blocking known scrapers, to prevent copying, once it is has taken place, you can not enforce the copyright of the work at all without permission of the commenter.

Circumventing the Problem

This, in turn, puts bloggers as well as forum admins in a precarious position. Their sites are utterly dependent on the content posted by strangers yet they have no control over the content itself.

Worse still, though an implied license grants certain rights, those rights are vague at best. Certain common events, such as a template change, editing a comment or adding advertisements to a once ad-free site could, potentially, invalidate all or some of that license.

The best thing that bloggers can do to prevent these kinds of issues is to not rely on an implied license and, instead, require commenters to agree to agree to a terms of service in order to post their work. Though the best solution would be to have a lawyer-written terms of use, if that isn’t practical or is overkill for your situation, you can simply have your commenters post their works underneath a Creative Commons or other license.

For example, Digg stipulates that all comments posted by Digg users are dedicated to the Public Domain and Wikipedia requires all items posted to be dedicated to the GNU Free Documentation License.

Taking this simple step can make it clear both what you and others can do with the comment moving forward. For example, if commenters license their work under a CC license that allows commercial use, adding advertising in the future would not be a problem.

However, you have to bear in mind that your terms must be reasonable. For example, no commenter in their right mind would sign over their copyright to a blogger and, even if they did, it is unlikely that such an agreement would be enforceable. This means that, even with a proper license, you can not control how your comments are used elsewhere, you can not file DMCA notices on behalf of commenters without their permission and your commenters are free to do as they please with their work.

That being said, you still have the right to enforce your copyright on anything that you create. As such, if you participate in your own community, which you should do anyway, you could stop any wholesale comment copying by simply pressing the rights in the works that you do control.

In short, proper comment licensing and being involved in your site’s discussions are the two best things you can do to ensure your comments are not abused and that you avoid unnecessary conflict over your comments section.

Some Common Problems

With that information in mind, here are some of the more common situations that a blogger might face when it comes to their comments section.

What if a commenter, potentially a major one, has decided that they no longer want their works displayed on the site and ask for some or all of their works to be removed?

This is a common situation in forums but is becoming increasingly commonplace on blogs as blog communities become more elaborate.

In these situations, the best move usually is to just remove the works. Though, with proper licensing, you could avoid having any legal obligation to do so, it is rarely worth the drama and the headache to keep them up. Not only do such disputes often become great distractions for the community, but the commenter could file a DMCA takedown notice if they genuinely believed that they were within their rights.

The goal of having clear licensing terms, for the most part, is not to prevent yourself from having to remove works, but avoid these conflicts in general. If users realize the terms they posted their works under, they typically do not ask for removal and, if they do, are much less hostile about it.

What if the comment feed is scraped or someone copies and reposts a large number of the comments?

Unfortunately, there is not a lot one can usually do in these situations. If you can get the cooperation of your commenters and have them allow you to represent them, you can file a DMCA notice or take other action against the site. Otherwise, you are limited to taking action only for the works you created.

Copyright always goes to the author of a work or their employer (in certain cases). Other than the license terms you’ve been granted, you have no copyright interest in the work and certainly no right to act on behalf of the author without permission.

As mentioned above, there is nothing that can stop you from enforcing rights to your own works.

What if I want to edit a comment?

Editing is dangerous for many different reasons. First, editing a comment could be viewed as a copyright issue, creating a derivative work from the original that is not covered under the implied license of posting a comment. Second, if you change the meaning of something that is said, it could open you up to defamation issues.

Though fixing minor errors or removing foul language likely won’t cause any problems, heavy editing is risky. If a comment requires a lot of editing to meet your guidelines, it is best to use the “delete” button and ask the commenter to re-post it.

What if I want to change my site drastically, ad advertisements or alter the way comments are displayed?

For the most part, the implied license would cover any foreseeable changes you make to your site. This includes most theme changes and possibly even the addition of advertisements. Still, it is always best to have a real license, not an implied one.

Besides, sudden changes are a primary reasons why people request their comments be removed.

Conclusions

The disputes with commenters are still fairly rare, as blog communities grow larger and more intricate, so will the likelihood of such disputes. Furthermore, as rare as they are, they typically are headache-inducing conflicts that cause emotions to run very high.

The best thing any blogger can do is work to avoid these problems altogether through proper licensing and then protect their comments by participating in their own communities, both encouraging conversation and taking an interest in their comments.

Given the value comments add to a blog and how much time many bloggers spend trying to stimulate the conversation, it makes sense to think about how you can best protect your interest in them while being fair to your visitors.

After all, if done correctly, a fair commenting system can benefit both the blogger and the commenters that make the conversation happen.

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But while using your own images is always the best way to go, there are several great sources to help you find and locate images that you can use as part of your blog posts. In fact, there are some very neat tools designed specifically to help you correctly license and use other people’s photography, art and more.

The best part of all is that these tools are free. They will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires.

Photo Dropper

Photo Dropper is hands down one of my favorite WordPress plugins. Not only does it make excellent use of Creative Commons-licensed photos, but it solves one of the biggest problems with CC licensing, incomplete compliance with the terms of the license.

Photo Dropper is extremely simple to use. Simply install it in your Wordpress plugins, activate it, set your options and then, on the “Write Post” page you can either click the “PD” icon next to the other media items or scroll down below the post entry box.

From there, you’ll be able to search for keywords related to your post. Photo Dropper will then search Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed works that might fit with your description. When you find one you like, you select the size you want and Photo Dropper inserts it into your post, complete with a CC-compliant attribution line.

Photo Dropper may take some fiddling to get relevant images and you might have to tweak the HTML to get it to fit well in your posts. However, it is still by far the easiest way to insert legal images into your posts.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a Firefox extension/IE plugin that integrates itself with most major blogging platforms, including both self-installed and hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger accounts, MovableType and more. When the user pulls up their blog’s editing interface, they are presented with related links, stories, tags and images that they can use with the post.

The advantage of Zemanta is that its images come from a variety of sources including public domain sources, Creative Commons sources, including Flickr, and other sources that license their images for use at low resolution. This provides a much greater variety of images to the user and it automatically performs a license-compliant insertion of the image into the post.

The drawback to Zemanta is that it can make modifications to the post beyond what is selected. You may need to go through your post’s HTML code thoroughly after insertion to be certain that nothing unwanted was inserted.

GumGum

While the sources above are great for those that need abstract photographs or just something quirky to go with a story, finding an image to go with a news or politics story can be very tricky. Fortunately there are also a series of services to help with that, including GumGum.

The service allows publishers to search through related images and then embed interesting photos as a line of JavaScript code. Why JavaScript? Because that is how GumGum provides the service for free, using the JavaScript to both protect the image and display ads on top of it.

This use of ads is what may upset many. Where Photo Dropper and Zamanta don’t display ads, GumGum does. Also, the use of JavaScript may prevent the image from showing up in some RSS readers. These drawbacks, along with the need to apply for an account, are but a small price to pay for high-quality images.

Update: GumGum has clarified this article and said that they only require a one-time JavaScript insertion and then grant access to the full images, this negates many of these drawbacks. There is also a pay-per view model that allows you to skip the ads and just pay every time the image is displayed.

PicApp

Similar to GumGum, PicApp lets you search through newsworthy images to find ones that might interest you and then lets you embed the one that works best as a JavaScript. However, PicApp also lets you search for “creative” as well as “editorial” images, giving you a slightly wider variety.

PicApp comes with many of the same concerns and drawbacks as GumGum and uses a similar advertising model to pay for the free service. PicApp, however, does not require you to register for the service and you can begin embedding images from the very first time you visit.

Whether you use PicApp or GumGum will likely be a matter of personal preference as the two sites largely fill the same niche. It comes down to which site has the best images for your content and which embeds you prefer.

Voxant Newsroom

Voxant Newsroom is another service that functions similar to GumGum or PicApp, letting users embed content, this time as a Flash app. But this service, unlike the former two, get their images exclusively from major mainstream media outlets including the Associated Press, CBS News and more.

As neat as Voxant is, I previously covered it in my broader article about getting free content for your site, there is not much flexibility regarding the layout of the embedded images. However, the site does offer a variety of content, including video and articles, all from major news sources.

Once again you and your visitors will be putting up with advertisements over the media, at least in many cases, but what is more likely a deal breaker for many is that the layouts of the images may not fit in many blog layouts and are often too large to go neatly with posts.

This is definitely one to consider though and see if it can work for you.

Conclusions

The bottom line is this, content licensing is hard, even with Creative Commons. Fortunately though, there are a series of sites that have come up to do the hard work for you and let you easily and legally use images with your blog posts.

In addition to these sites, there are also a slew of stock photography sites that let you download and use photographs and images for free or a small license. However, they generally provide no help with the insertion process and, if there are licensing terms, provide little help in complying with them.

A solution such as these tools can help not only keep your site legal, but speed up the writing process dramatically, saving you time and money.

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But while there is no doubt that at least some mainstream blogs use content creation tools to aid in meeting their deadlines, content generation has found a much more comfortable home with another group, spammers.

Creating content from nothing has always been something of a holy grail for spammers. Traditionally, filling their junk blogs has required scraping content from article databases, other blogs (usually without permission) or other sources. This has made them easy for search engines to spot and also drawn the ire of many bloggers who have had their content reused.

But technology is advancing and content generation is becoming increasingly practical. Many spammers have already moved to it and it seems likely that others will follow soon. This has some strong implications for both the future of spam and the Web itself.

Why Content Generation is Better

Simply put, spammers have to get content from somewhere and methods have varied. However, content scraping, one of the more popular means, has several flaws with it.

1. Unpredictable: If you scrape an RSS feed, you can’t guarantee that the content will be high-quality, what length it will be, what keywords it will target, when it will arrive or even if it will come at all. Content generation puts the spammer in control of these elements.
2. Copyright Issues: If you don’t scrape public domain or correctly licensed material, you may find yourself with serious copyright issues. This can be avoided by creating unique content.
3. Duplicate Content Issues: Scraped content, by definition, exists elsewhere on the Web first. This means the search engines are not likely to give the spam copy much credibility.

Typically, spammers have been able to overcome these odds through sheer quantity. They shoot out thousands and thousands of spam blogs, relying on a few to slip under the search engines’ collective radar.

Though this is more than doable with current technology, it is horribly inefficient.To escape detection and beat the search engines, spammers have always sought ways to improve on scraping while keeping the process automated.

First came “spinning”, a process by which an existing scraped article is passed through a thesaurus, causing words to be replaced with random synonyms. This often made the article unrecognizable but also made it garbled and hard to read. Search engines were also quick to catch on to this for the most part since the structure of the work was unchanged.

The next step was article ghostwriting. This was a process by which a generator would pluck very short passages, a sentence in many cases, from dozens of sources and meld them into a single article. While the helped avoid many of the copyright issues, the articles, typically, were almost unreadable and since the search engines still recognized much of the text. This meant that neither humans nor search engines were completely fooled.

The end goal had always been to stop relying on outside sources altogether and generate content from nothing. However, such tools, typically, have been very weak. They produced poor quality articles that were pattern-based, making it easy for the search engines to spot.

However, these tools have been improving steadily over the years and, when combined with faster computers, are beginning to reach a point where a computer can write a decent article. Though they still need a lot of help from humans, we are already in a position where an article can be generated, edited and published faster than it can be written from scratch.

It is only a matter of time before spammers can create such articles from nothing, if it isn’t happening already.

Consequences

The shift to generated blog spam has been coming for some time and has already begun. Though it may mean some will see a reduction in the amount of scraping that they deal with, there will be a whole host of other problems that come with it.

1. Difficult to Stop: With scraped content, a copyright notice can usually get the spam blog shut down. Junk content that is generated will depend more on anti-spam policies, which are very spotty when it comes to dealing with spam blogs.
2. Poor Search Detection: Search engines have never done a particularly good job with detecting duplicate content, but this will be a new struggle. Humans will find it harder to compete than ever.
3. Easier Human Detection: Spam sites that scrape have gotten better about hiding their spam-like qualities and have gotten better at fooling human readers. Generated articles posted without any editing, which will be the hallmark of spammers, will almost always be of lower quality and will be fairly easy to detect by a human, even if the rest of the site looks more authentic.

In the long run, what this means is that we are going to be putting up with search results cluttered with garbage that Google struggles to filter out even though, to us, it is clearly spam. This is going to impact both our efforts to achieve good search positioning and our ability to find the information that we want.

However, the greatest impact might not be what content generation does to spam, but rather, what it does to legitimate blogs.

Blurring Lines

The question content generation creates is not one of how it will help the spammers, but how it will be used by ordinary bloggers. As the article above mentions, The Next Web has used it to help write articles for their site and they allege that others have done the same.

But even if neither of these things turn out to be true, it is more than possible that a good article generator could help a human author write, edit and post content faster than any human could do by hand. This enters into what many would consider a gray area. Though the results are not spam-like, the use of spam tools seems to taint the writing process.

This raises a series of questions. Is there a place for these kinds of tools in legitimate sites? How much can/should authors lean on content generation tools when making their own work? What role, if any, should these tools have in mainstream blogging?

There are no easy answers and, in truth, any answers we do conjure up are likely to be based on the specific situation at hand. After all, spam is not a matter of being automated or human-created, it is a matter of what the intent of the content is and whether the content is welcome on the Internet.

Those lines are blurry already and as content generation finds greater acceptance among non-spamming bloggers, they are only going to get more so.

Conclusions

The good news is that there is one thing content generation, no matter how it is used, can do: Add value.

Machines may be able to write decent articles, but it is humans that add wisdom, opinion, experience and novelty to them. Without that, such articles are doomed to fail.

Though the Web seems to prize quantity over quality, there is still a place for good quality content to succeed. How much you post and write is certainly a factor, but as many sites with slower cycles have shown, what you put up is far more important.

If such tools are going to find mainstream acceptance, they will have to be used sparingly as the emphasis will still have to be on what humans add to the equation.

As much as some feel the blogging world is an echo chamber, it will only become much more so if machines are given too much control. Right now, we all are unique with our own styles, views and ideas. That won’t be the case if we all start to use the same computer ghostwriter.

Personally, I plan to continue writing useful content the old-fashioned way. It may not rocket me to stardom, but at least I will feel good about my contribution to the Web.

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However, both Palin and the Palintology blog were thrust into the national spotlight in late August when John McCain selected Palin to be his candidate for Vice President. Though both the site and the candidate were suddenly a global focal point, not all of the attention was desireable.

The worst example came when Newsweek used the Palintology name on the front cover of their magazine. This prompted Houser to not only begin the process of registering her trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but also to contact Newsweek about potential trademark infringement.

But even as Houser and Newsweek seem to be working toward an amicable agreement, the story raises the issue about what bloggers can do when it comes to the names and logos of their blog. After all, if Palintology went from being a locally-focused political blog to having its name on the cover of Newsweek, so could almost any site.

Trademark Basics

According to the USPTO, a trademark is “a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods (or services) of one party from those of others.”

A trademark is created one of two ways. The first, and generally most common, is simply through use it in the marketplace. By using the term, logo or phrase in the marketplace to identify yourself, your goods or your services, you have trademark interest in the symbol.

The other is through formal registration with the USPTO, a process that can be expensive and time-consuming.

Though a form of intellectual property, trademark is different from copyright in several key ways.

1. Protection of Phrases: Trademark law protects phrases, symbols and other small works that would often times not qualify for copyright protection.
2. Limited Scope: Unlike copyright, which restricts the ability for others to simply copy a work, trademark has a much more limited scope, focusing instead on preventing confusion in the marketplace.
3. State Laws: With copyright, there is not such thing as a “state copyright” meaning that, to sue for infringement, you need to register with the U.S. Copyright Office and file in a Federal Court. With trademark, states have their on trademark laws in addition to the Federal statute, meaning that you can sue for infringement even without a formal registration.

Most likely, you already have at least some trademark protection in your blog name, logo and domain. This is because you use those things both to brand yourself and your service, namely your posts, in the marketplace. This trademark can be expanded even further if it is used to identify a business, such as a consulting service, or is used on merchandise.

However, unless you’ve registered your trademark, the extent of the protection may be unclear and may be very limited. This will depend heavily on your individual situation including how unique your mark is, how you’ve used it and the relevant state laws.

It is worth noting that a trademark only applies within the marketplace it exists. For example, it is possible to have both Delta Faucets and Delta Airlines since the two do not compete with one another and confusion is not likely. Likewise, you can have Apple Music and Apple Computers and it is only when the computer company begins to sell music that a lawsuit arises. However, even that similarity was not enough in that case.

The bottom line is that trademarks are a very strange form of intellectual property, one that has a very narrow focus, but a very broad application.

Staying Out of Trouble

The most common place bloggers wind up in trouble with trademark issues is with their domain name. As illustrated in this Tubetorial, choosing a good domain name is the first step to avoiding trademark issues and failure to choose a unique name can result in either the loss of the domain through the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) or a lawsuit under the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act (ACPA).

Thus, it is important to search for a trademark, before registering a domain. As also advised in the Tubetorial, use both the USPTO’s Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) and a traditional search engine to ensure that no companies or other sites might have a claim on that trademark.

However, even after your domain is registered you need to be vigilant about trademark issues. You need to ensure that your logo is not confusing to another mark, that you don’t imply a relationship that does not exist with another company (such as saying you are partnered or authorized by them) and that, when referencing other trademarks, it is clear you are not affiliated with them.

Generally speaking, talking about trademarks is safe since the protection deals solely with confusion in the marketplace, not mere copying, but it is worth looking at every mention and asking if a user could possibly be confused by it.

Protecting Your Trademark

Protecting your trademark is important as trademark law, unlike copyright, allows for a holder to lose their mark should they fail to protect it. This is one of the reasons Digg has been so aggressive about protecting its mark.

If you are interested in protecting your trademark, the first step will likely be a USPTO registration. Though you can undertake the process yourself, it is worthwhile to get the assistance of an attorney in this matter to ensure that you receive all of the protections available to you. Doing this will have many benefits, including the ability to sue in a Federal court.

More than that, it is important to stay on top of your mark and be aware of how others are using it. To that end, Google Alerts, if used correctly, is one of the most powerful tools available. Google Alerts will email you when anyone publishes a page with your trademark, whether it is a mention in a blog post or a site with the same name. This is a useful tool not only for tracking your trademark, but also the popularity of your site in general.

There are also services that will, such as Domain Tools Mark Alert, that will monitor for new domain registrations for any that could infringe upon your trademark. These services usually cost a small amount but may be useful in that they allow you to protest a domain name before the site goes live.

No matter what tools you use, it is important to stay on top of how others use your mark and, if you see any potential infringement, that you consult an attorney.

Conclusions

Though the conclusion of the Palintology case is far from certain, right now Houser and her attorney are working both on registering the mark with the USPTO and working with Newsweek to come up with an agreement.

The case, however, illustrates how a blog title can go from relative obscurity to a valuable global trademark overnight.

With the situation on the Web literally shifting overnight, it is important to be on top of your trademark, not just so that you can be aware of how people are using your site name, but so that you can protect the value in your investment.

After all, the value in a trademark is not something that is created. Valuable trademarks are earned and it is important to protect your effort.

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Fortunately, the Web provides many great ways to keep on top of what is going on in your field, if you know how to use the tools that are available.

For me, the trick has never been to find the one best way to get new story ideas, but to but open up a wide variety of communication lines. Though my system is not perfect and I continue to miss stories from time to time, I also have a backlog of about three weeks forth of topics in my notebook.

That is because finding story ideas, for most niches, is fairly simple. It is just a matter of knowing where to look.

Blog Search

When I first started blogging, this was my primary source of news and information but have since waned greatly in usefulness for me. Technorati provides a means to subscribe to keywords of your choosing, giving up updates in your RSS reader as stories are posted relating to your topic.

To take advantage of this feature, simply use the site to search for your favorite topics and the subscribe to the RSS feed created on each page. You will not need to visit the site again as updates will be delivered directly to your RSS reader.

While I still find this useful for locating bloggers that may have questions or need assistance, its role in finding stories has been reduced drastically due to an increase in spam and general lack of effectiveness. Google Blog Search also provides a similar function but has the same limitations.

Twitter

Though many feel Twitter is nothing but a waste of time or a distraction, I’ve found it very useful for keeping in touch with what is going on my field. Not only do people send me @replies and direct messages with stories I might be interested in, but since Twitter acquired Summize, their search feature has been incredibly useful as well.

Much like with Technorati, their search feature allows you to subscribe to queries in your RSS reader and receive updates that way. Alternatively, you can use TweetDeck to subscribe to keywords, thus eliminating most of the delay that can come with adding a keyword to your RSS reader.

All in all, even if you don’t use Twitter personally, it can still be a valuable resource for finding out what is going on.

Email

Though it may be old-fashioned, email and the classic tip off still play a major role in where I get my information from. My friends and my readers are wonderful about letting me know about what they see going on and, routinely, let me know before any of my other methods do.

Also useful is subscribing to email newsletters related to your topic and getting ideas and links through those. Though many bloggers think of email newsletters as an anachronism in the age of RSS, there are still many who prefer to get their information via email and there are often very good newsletters that serve them.

Social News

Digg, Reddit, Techmeme, Sphinn or whatever your poison is, read it and keep on top of it. Not only do many of these sites provide RSS feeds for keyword searches, but provide a great deal of information about what others are discussing. This type of insight is invaluable when you are trying to talk about what others think is important.

In short, keeping on top of social news not only helps you get ideas for what to write about today, but might suggest larger shifts that you can make in your blog moving forward to give it a broader appeal.

Regator

If using traditional blog search feels a bit too much like drinking from a firehose, Regator can help whittle down the number of posts that you have to read.

Regator is not a traditional blog search engine, but rather a blog directory with approximately 2000 of what they consider to be the best blogs. However, much like Technorati and Google Blog Search, they offer users the ability to subscribe to a certain keyword and get updates.

However, Regator’s results tend to be much fewer in number and much more potent. Where my Technorati feeds might produce two hundred results in a day, most of which are not well-targeted, Regator provides less than ten, most of which are interesting.

I use both Regator and Technorati to help me keep on top of things but I give more weight and spend more time with my Regator results.

Bringing it Together

Once you have found all of your sources, you need to bring it together in a way that is manageable for you. For most bloggers, that will mean passing it through your RSS reader so that you will have all of the results in one place

But once you have a good stream of news and ideas coming to you, it is important to stay on top of it. Reading it regularly, though not so often that it becomes a distraction, is important. Once you see something you want to hang onto, either bookmarking the article or jotting down the idea is critical.

What usually develops from this is something of an RSS work flow where stories are read and then either discarded, commented on or bookmarked for later. This makes it possible to quickly go through your incoming stream of information while staying abreast of what is going on.

After all, getting ideas and staying up to date is important, but it should not take up all of your time.

Conclusions

Of course, not everyone is going to agree with these tools nor will they be right for everyone. They are simply what has worked for me so far. I am constantly shifting my strategy and expect others to do the same and have tools that work for them but not for me.

The important thing is to find the best sources for you and keep your eyes open for new approaches that may work better. After all, no matter how great your system is, it is important to keep honing and refining it to both decrease the time spent and increase the stories received.

Until you get every story you would ever want to know about and none of the stories you don’t, there is always room for improvement.

The bottom line is that, though the Web can make it difficult to find what is important to you, there are a lot of great tools that do much of the dirty work for you. If you take advantage of them and find a system that works for, you may never struggle for an idea again…

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However, there was a time not that long ago in which Webmasters were optimizing every element of their page feverishly to squeeze every ounce of speed from it. Broadband simply was not that common and, even over dial up connections, visitors had twitchy fingers on the “back” button at all times.

But in the age of YouTube, Flash ads and embeddable content, those lessons have been all but forgotten, However, not everyone has access to high-speed connection, especially in rural locations, and after spending just a few days limited to dial up, the lessons come flooding back.

So what lessons did I learn while surfing the slow Web while evacuated? Here is just a sample of what I saw.

Brick Walls on the Slow Track

When you’re surfing the Web on dial up connection, you notice instantly things that load quickly versus those that don’t. If a site has an element that requires a lot of data, page loading stops cold and frustration quickly mounts.

What stunned me during my time on the slow Web was just how many sites had such roadblocks. I steered clear of sites that I knew would not load well, such as YouTube, but still seemed to watch my connection struggle at nearly every turn.

When I began to look at what was causing these issues, I quickly learned that the culprit was typically one of five things:

1. Embedded Video/Documents: This is one I am guilty of, embedding videos and documents when a link would likely have sufficed. Embedded videos are great you have a high-speed connection but are a real headache when you don’t. This is especially annoying when they pop up in your RSS reader, slowing down what is otherwise a fast process.
2. Extravagant Ads: Many with fast connections use Adblock Plus to avoid being hassled by ads. However, on a slow connection, ad blocking is almost a requirement. With so many data-heavy Flash ads or slow-loading full page effects, many sites have become so bloated with advertising that the content barely loads on dial up.
3. Huge Images: Many of the roadblocks were caused by poor design choice. Many sites have huge banners at the top of their page that prevent slow moving browsers from loading anything beneath it. This includes many popular blogs and shopping sites.
4. JavaScript: Web applications, such as Gmail, become almost useless on very slow connections. Though I was able to use Gmail’s HTML interface with success, other sites didn’t have static alternatives. This kept me out of a lot of sites that, seemingly, should have loaded quickly.
5. Widgets: After a few hours on dial up the word “widgets” became a four-letter word. Though some, such as some that showed small Flickr thumbnails, were mere speed bumps, others froze the site completely depending on the order in which everything loaded. Since I have zero sites where widgets are the reason I am visiting, this was a constant annoyance.

I’m not saying that one should not use these things, that is a personal decision for every blogger and Webmaster, but one should be aware that, if you do include these elements, you are making it so that those with slower connections are going to have a long wait before your page loads.

Speed Bumps and Annoyances

In addition to things that seemed to put a lengthy pause on the loading of a Web site, there were many elements that caused the Web to “hiccup” a bit without putting the breaks on too hard. Though many of these things were annoying, they didn’t stop me from accessing any sites.

1. Images Where Text or CSS Will Do: A lot of sites, in order to make their pages more attractive, replace buttons or text elements with images. These are usually small images so they don’t cause too much of a problem but it is still frustrating to wait a few seconds for an element to load to find out it was a “submit” button.
2. Google Adsense: Most text-based Google Ads were not a terrible burden to load. A few times I saw sites hang for a second or two while loading Google Ads but I never had the kind of issue with Adsense that I had with other advertisers.
3. Slow Servers: I don’t fully understand why this was the case since, theoretically, the bandwidth bottleneck should have been on my end. However, I noticed a decent performance jump when viewing sites hosted within the U.S. and on services that I knew were good. The further away the server, the slower the site loaded, even though I was only pulling Web 1.0 speeds.

These are issues that may be worth correcting but are not really deal-breakers. All of these things are fine in moderation, but it is easy to see how they could drive some visitors away if overdone.

Non-Issues

In addition to the brick walls and speed bumps, there were several things that I had anticipated being issues that turned out to be perfectly acceptable.

1. Small Images: Thumbnails and other small images, even when in high numbers, loaded well almost every time. This was a huge relief to me after realizing that Plagiarism Today’s front page was filled with them.
2. Anticipated Large Images: During my evacuation, I spent a lot of time on the National Hurricane Center’s Web site pulling up their latest maps and images. Though the images were slow to load, it was not an issue since I knew what I was getting into and my patience was greater. Warning and choice is clearly a key to keeping users with slower connections.
3. Most Blogs: Since most blogs are primarily text, nearly every single blog I went to while on dial up loaded well, it was just those with widgets and embeds that created problem. Also, blogs on free services such as WordPress.com and Blogger fared better than self-hosted ones, likely due to faster servers and more limited design choices.

All of this highlights the importance of making your site bandwidth-friendly and not letting it get out of control as far as data goes. Though blogs are naturally streamlined to go over slower connections, that advantage is quickly lost when elements are added that weigh the site down.

Blog Clutter

In a recent series on this site, Lorelle has been writing about what she appropriately calls WTF Blog Clutter. This has included unnecessary widgets, videos and other blog elements that clutter up a site, some of which I have mentioned here.

If you’re interested in keeping your site lean and mean, this is definitely a series you need to read and keep on top of.

Conclusions

Many bloggers may not have much interest in ensuring that their site works well on slower connections. With broadband penetration, especially among heavy Internet users, climbing steadily there might not be as much motivation to keep things trimmed down as there once was.

However, it is important to remember that it doesn’t take an evacuation to wind up surfing the slow web. Network congestion, an outage of a primary service or just a trip to visit the in-laws can put anyone back ten years in terms of connectivity.

There is still an audience on dial up and still a need for others to use it occasionally. How much you want to invest in appealing to them is up to you, but it seems worthwhile to avoid making any unnecessary missteps.

If linking to a video rather than embedding it can save a keyboard from being pounded on, it is probably worth doing.

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Now, three years later, I find myself in a similar position. As I am writing this, I am evacuated for Hurricane Gustav while tending to a new blog, Inelegant Solutions (see link above) and several older ones. I also have to worry about writing jobs and consulting work even though my computers and my files are mostly packed up.

However, this time around, I am better prepared. Not only was the evacuation more smooth, but I am better able to maintain my presence online despite barely being able to see the Web.

However, making that happen requires a great deal of preparation and taking several steps before anything happens. For bloggers who want to keep writing no matter what, I would strongly urge the following steps.

1. Make a List of Needed Tools

Make a list of software you need to run your site. For many, that might be just a Web browser and a Web connection, others need image editors, screen capture utilities or other tools. Then, either arrange to get a portable version of that application or find a Web-based alternative.

The goal is to set it up so that you would have everything you need should you be forced to use a strange computer for weeks on end.

2. Use Portable Apps

Speaking of portable applications, take a moment and buy a small USB stick, only a gigabyte or two is needed, and install any and all portable applications that you think might be useful. Especially important apps are Firefox, along with any extensions you need, OpenOffice, an RSS reader (to allow offline RSS viewing) and anything else that you might want.

Doing this can speed up your “settling in” phase by giving you a series of applications you are already familiar with, not forcing you to relearn anything. Also, be sure to keep these applications up to date.

3. Move Data to The Cloud

Any information that you need to run your site, put it in a secure place on the Web. Remember that you will likely be using a strange computer so any URLs that you can’t remember and type by hand, put those on the Web too. If you use a program to store your passwords, store a cache of those on the Web also. Obviously, you’ll want to encrypt and secure such information before posting it.

Even if you have your own browser on a thumb drive, as recommended above, it is best to make sure everything is in multiple places. I have been repeatedly saved by my private bookmarks on Diigo.

4. Use Web-Based Email

Even if you strongly prefer using Outlook or Thunderbird to check your email, having a Web-based alternative is a huge asset in a disaster. On that front, I strongly recommend Google Apps if you operate your own domain or regular Gmail if you don’t. It takes mere moments to set up, gives you full IMAP access to your email and, when you are not able to use your computer, gives you Gmail access to your account.

If you can’t or don’t wish to use Gmail to manage your mail, make sure that you have some form of Web access to your inbox. Otherwise, you might not be able to communicate.

5. Use Twitter

While on the topic of communication, if you do not have a Twitter account, set one up. In addition to being a great site on a slow connection, it also allows for updating via cell phone. Twitter can be an invaluable tool for providing updates and communicate with your readers when you have limited access to the Web.

6. Get the Right Equipment

Laptops are a necessary tool for working mobile in any situation. Remember though, most of the time you do not need a lot of horsepower to get the job done. Using an ultra-portable such as an EeePC can save you money, space and backache. If you bring a keyboard and mouse, you can set up almost anywhere and start working immediately.

7. Find Web Access

Laptop cell phone cards are great tools for mobile Web access but they are both expensive and limited. If you don’t have cell phone access where you are, your card will do no good and you will still be paying $50 a month or more for it, regardless of how much you use it.

If you decide to get one, pick up a USB one so that it can be used in almost any computer. All in all though, these do not make great backup plans because of their cost. Most people who don’t do a lot of mobile blogging don’t need one.

An alternative is to get a cell phone that can be used as a wireless access card, and use it instead should you find yourself in a pinch.

Most of the time, you’re better off hunting free wifi either at a coffee shop, bookstore, library or, even better, your hotel. Though you can’t always be picky, especially if you are forced to evacuate, you can usually find wifi somewhere nearby if you search.

Failing that, be creative and ask around. After I returned to New Orleans following Katrina, I was without Internet access for three weeks but my friend, who was on a different carrier, had it restored in just a few days.

8. Bring it Together

Once you have your tools and your access, you need to start working. However, this is often the hardest part. Distractions abound and tight quarters leave little chance to concentrate. Furthermore, a strange work environment can make it very difficult to do even simple tasks, no matter how hard you worked to make it like your old one.

For me, I found that it helps to shut yourself away and get things done. Work for at least 30 minutes at a time. If there is anything you can bring from your old environment with you, do so. For example, if you like to work with music playing, make sure you have some of your favorite songs with you.

As with anything though, don’t force it. If you can’t work right then, trying to make yourself will probably only make things work. Life always trumps blogging. If you can’t think or don’t want to write, walk away and come back when you are ready.

For me, I find that working during a period of stress helps me out. It takes my mind off of what is going on and gives me something to do other than worry and mope. Without the work I put into Plagiarism Today following Katrina, I seriously doubt I would have kept my sanity.

If you are not that type of person, I understand. The steps in this guide, however, are still a good idea. After all, power outages and computer crashes can happen to anyone and the same steps that can help keep you working through an evacuation can also help you work through other difficulties.

The bottom line is that, if your blog is a big part of your life, it makes sense to disaster-proof the same as you would anything else.

For me at least, my hard work is one of my most valued possessions.

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Though there is nothing wrong with being aggressive about your copyright, especially when you make your living from it. The problem comes when companies cross the line and sacrifice the rights of users and the public in their bid to protect their work.

These attack dogs are dangerous for many reasons. First, they are the ones most likely to file takedown notices, including against bloggers. Second, they often times trample free speech and run afoul of the law. Finally, they also end up writing both the copyright news we read and many of the copyright laws we follow.

So who are the most aggressive copyright holders? Though such a list is entirely subjective, here is my personal list of the most aggressive major copyright holders I have been tracking.

7. The Associated Press

Much of the AP’s current reputation when it comes to copyright stems from it recent controversy with the Drudge Retort. But while much of that incident was blown of proportion, as well as much of the AP’s stance on copyright, there is no doubt that they have been very aggressive protecting their work, including suing Verisign for their Moreover news service.

Though the AP is not as aggressive as many paint it to be, there is little doubt that they monitor, track and protect their content very thoroughly.

6. Disney

Among the copyright astute, Disney has a reputation that is almost beyond reproach. Despite a history of making blockbuster hits out of public domain stories, the house of mouse has been notoriously aggressive about protecting its rights.

Though Disney has been known to file more than a few copyright suits, its greatest success has always been in lobbying and legislation. Disney has far more to do with many of the current copyright laws than either the RIAA or the MPAA.

5. The International Olympic Committee

After the closing ceremonies, we tend not to hear much from the IOC, however, they remain one of the most aggressive copyright holders pretty much at any point.

This Olympics alone has seem them demand the removal of Olympic torrents from The Pirate Bay, thousands of takedowns on YouTube and even a controversy involving a likely mistaken takedown notice.

The IOC is notoriously protective of both its video and of its symbol, the five interlocking rings.

4. The National Football League

Though sports organizations are known for being protective of their copyrights, the NFL trumps pretty much everyone in this category. They famously demanded a takedown of a video only displaying the copyright notice from the Super Bowl.

In fact, they got it taken down twice.

When it comes to copyright, it seems that the NFL is in full blitz mode.

3. Viacom

When one things about aggressive copyright holders, Viacom is usually somewhere near the top of the list. Though they are famous for their 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, it is their hailstorm of takedown notices that really tells the story.

According to YouTomb, Viacm is the single largest sender of DMCA notices to the site, nearly doubling its nearest U.S.-based competitor, the WWE.

2. Warner Brothers

Though it would be easy to simply put the MPAA and the RIAA in the two and one slots, I decided to focus on companies, not trade groups. However, out of the “AA” crowd, Warner Brothers is a stand out in terms of aggressiveness.

Their protectiveness over The Dark Knight was both infamous and effective, on the music side, the sued the search engine Seeqpod and they launched a controversial campaign against The Pirate Bay.

They have been behind much of the copyright news over the past few years and are continuing to play a key role in the ongoing copyfight.

1. NBC Universal

Universal’s aggressiveness knows almost no limits. Not only have they been at the forefront of many RIAA lawsuits, but they have pulled their songs from Myspace, yanked their shows from iTunes (though they have since hinted at a return), blocked their shows from being recorded on DVRs, sued Redlasso and have been very aggressive about having their clips removed from YouTube.

However, their most controversial move was filing a DMCA notice against Stephanie Lenz, who posted a 30-second YouTube clip of her baby dancing with Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” barely audible in the background.

However, what makes Universal unique is that their aggressiveness is bound with progressiveness. They helped found the video site Hulu, which plays many NBC shows for free, and have been generally very forward-thinking with their copyright strategies.

Conclusions

As with any list, not everyone is going to agree with the order nor are they going to believe everyone of importance was included. So that brings me to my question. Who did I leave out and what would you change on this list?

Feel free to leave your comments below.

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Since then, I have worked with over 2 dozen hosts (not counting copyright issues) and have set up a variety of sites and blogs for me, my friends and my clients. Most of my experiences have been good though I have, on a few occasions, been severely burned.

But for anyone looking to host their own blog, perhaps to move up from a free hosting solution, finding a good host can be a daunting decision. Many simply go with the first name that comes to mind and hope for the best while others make their decision purely on price and take a serious gamble with their site.

For those seeking hosting for the first time or looking to move to a new service, I am offering my ten rules of finding a good host.

1. Know your Terminology

To someone unfamiliar with Web hosting, the terminology can be scary. If you aren’t familiar with the definitions of common hosting terms, find a glossary of such terms and refer back to it regularly. Though most of the terms are straightforward, you need to know what you’re buying to make a sound judgment on which is the best.

2. Get the Right Kind of Hosting

Broadly speaking there, are four kinds of hosting you’re likely to encounter, shared, grid, VPS and dedicated. They each are designed for different situations and buying the wrong kind of hosting for your site is a sure-fire way to either throw away money or experience a site failure.

In brief, the four kinds can be looked at like this:

1. Shared: An environment where many different accounts, often well into the 100s, share a single server and its resources. It is the cheapest and easiest hosting, but also has the steepest caps and, depending on how the server is set up, can suffer from poor reliability if other sites on the server are causing problems. Ideal for new sites and those that require very little resources.
2. Grid: An alternative to shared, it is slightly more expensive but offers greater flexibility. Specifically, grid hosts are able to expand and contract the resources each site has available based upon need, helping sites stay up during periods of peak traffic, such as after a Digg. Best for sites that need few resources but may experience severe traffic spikes.
3. VPS: VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and is an arrangement where several sites share a server but each have a dedicated portion of the server’s resources and every account holder has administrator access, allowing greater flexibility and the ability to install custom applications. Ideal for experienced Webmasters who either need to run a lot of smaller Web sites or a few that might require more than Grid hosting. Also a popular choice for anyone running custom applications due to admin access.
4. Dedicated: This is simply where you rent your own server and have access to all of its resources. Similar to a VPS but with much more power and higher cost.

Simply put, knowing what kind of hosting you need enables you to narrow down your search and make fair comparisons between services.

3. Price Services Smartly

One of the challenges of buying hosting is that the cheaper host is not always a better deal. Research many different hosts and compare their prices. You should discover that there is a range of prices that are fairly close together. Be wary of hosts that offer accounts significantly below that range as they often times had to cut corners to get their price so low.

4. Unlimited Hosting is a Scam

Many hosts will offer you unlimited bandwidth and/or storage space as an enticement. However, this is almost never the case. These hosts always work into the contract clauses that let them disable sites that are interfering with their service, meaning that you go from having clear, firm rules on usage to being completely at the whim of your host.

Your best bet is to get a host with high caps on paper and a fair overage plan.

5. Read Negative Reviews

Once you think a host might become a good fit, you need to research it. One of the best places to start is looking up reviews of the company and, when doing so, you should focus heavily on the negative reviews.

Specifically, you are looking to both ensure that the host has negative reviews and see if there is any common theme with them.

Since every host has a bad day, even the best will have some bad reviews. If a host has none, it might be a sign that the company hasn’t been around long or has been AstroTurfing the review sites. Also, reading the experiences of unhappy customers can highlight any patterns, such as bad support or poor reliability.

Obviously, don’t go with a host that has a very high number of bad reviews.

6. Really Look at the Company’s Site

At this point, you’ve probably spent at least some time on the hosting company’s site, take a moment to really look at it. Does it look professional? Does it appear they are a large company? Do they run their own datacenters? What do they feel are their selling points?

Though the site is purely a work of marketing, it does say a lot about the company. You can get a good feel for the size of the company, what they value and what you can expect from them. This is especially useful when compared against the negative reviews.

7. Test the Service

Using a site such as Host Tracker, analyze a domain on the host (or the host’s home page itself if you can’t find a site using the service) to understand how fast the network is and get a rough idea of speed and reliability. These tools are not perfect, but if you notice that one host is significantly slower than the others, you might want to drop it from your list.

8. Talk to the Company

By this point, you should be down to a short list of companies you are considering. At this point you need to try and see what they are like closer up.

If you can, find someone from the company and talk to them, introduce yourself and ask them any questions you have. It is best to do this in person or over the phone, but via chat or even email can work.

Always remember though that the sales staff and the support staff are completely separate and the response time/helpfulness is not always indicative of what happens when you have a problem after signing on.

9. Start With a Short Contract

Some hosts will try to entice you to sign up for a long contract, often more than a year in length, by offering steep discounts. However, it is important to test a host with a shorter contract before making such a commitment. Sign up for a month or two before deciding if that is where you want to be for the next twelve.

10. Have an Escape Plan

Sometimes, no matter how much research or planning you do, things go wrong. Always have an escape plan for you and your site should things sour. Don’t cancel your current hosting, if any, until you are certain that things are stable. You may also want to keep a very inexpensive hosting account available as an emergency place to go should something catastrophic happen.

As always, keep backups of your content be sure that your information is stored at more than one location. Make sure you have a plan for what happens if your server completely disappears tomorrow.

My Non-Rule

One step many will note that I didn’t list as a rule is getting recommendations from friends. The reason is that, while those can help, especially from those running similar sites, they are rarely as useful as learning what happened when things went wrong.

The goal is not to learn how great a host is on their best day, but how they were and what happened on their worst. The reason is that, when things are great, most of us ignore our hosts. However, when they are bad, that is when we need them.

Just because someone has not had a problem with a host yet does not mean they never will. Every host has something go wrong, it is just a matter of how often and how they react to it.

Conclusions

Buying hosting is hard. Even the best inevitably get burned from time to time as there is always a certain gamble to making your final selection.

The best anyone can do is perform due diligence, make the best purchase possible and prepare for the worst.

Sadly, buying hosting is a lot like buying a car, you never really know what you’ve purchased until you’ve driven a few thousand miles.

Questions

What hosts have you used? Which have you loved? Which have you hated? Have there been any experiences that really stand out? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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1. Not allow any prejudice or personal feelings about Google’s blogging service to enter my review.
2. Read this book from the perspective of the target audience and decide how much it might help them.

The first turned out to be surprisingly easy. I’ve dabbled with Blogspot blogs before during tests and was curious what advanced capabilities the service had.

The second, however, turned out to be much more difficult, not because I found it hard to put myself in the shoes of the target audience, but because I couldn’t figure out exactly who the target audience was.

Serious Flaws

The book follows the path of a fictional fruit-peddler named Georgia. Georgia runs a blossoming organic fruit business and has, at the beginning of the book, set up a stock Blogger blog with a default theme.

Over the next ten chapters and 330 pages, we watch as Georgia’s blog, in a transformation akin to a teen movie, goes from being an ugly duckling into a professional masterpiece.

But while that sounds simple enough, the book is riddled with issues that make getting from A to B unnecessarily difficult. Specifically, the book is hamstrung by two problems that crop up in different chapters.

1. The book has a strange difficulty curve that causes it to hold your hand on simple projects but leave you to your own on harder ones.
2. Other chapters feel incomplete and disjunct from the main topic of the book.

Both of these problems, however, are caused by the same issue, that the book is trying to be all things to all people and, thus, doesn’t have the space to cover any of the topics it discusses adequately.

Steep Difficulty

The book can roughly be divided into two sections. Chapters 1, 2 and 10 all deal directly with Blogger as a service (though the first chapter is more of an introduction) while chapters 3-9 deal with more general blogging topics.

However, the chapters that deal with Blogger are frustrating to read due to a strange issue that causes the book to leave its target audience behind.

For example, in one section dealing with choosing colors for your blog, the author, Lee Jordan, holds your hand through accessing Blogger’s interface and selecting a new colors from the default palette. However, when it comes time use a custom color, the book gives you a cursory overview of what a hex code is and throws out a few random numbers. There are no resources for finding your own hex codes and no clues on how to represent colors other than the ones used in the test site.

The problem continues when the book hints at using a faint gradient to make a site more professional looking but offers no advice for creating or obtaining such gradient images. It also discusses resizing of images, specifically headers, without discussing the importance of constraining proportions. In fact, the book tells the reader to turn that feature off, thus resulting in images that look distorted.

Even in chapter 10, the problem appears as the book holds your hand through setting up Blogger to use FTP with your site, but offers no clue how to determine your root Web folder, other than encouraging you to use your FTP client or CPanel without any specifics. Also, it does not tell you where you can locate such hosting for yourself or offer any clues what the user should be seeking when purchasing hosting.

It might be easy to write off these omissions as being “beyond the scope of the book” but they are necessary to use what is taught. Without custom colors and/or gradients, you are limited to the examples in the book. Without custom image resizing, you can not create a professional logo. Finally, without hosting and an understanding of how FTP works, you can not actually use the FTP feature of Blogger.

The end result is that it is hard to tell who this book is for. If you are familiar with these topics, you’ll likely be put off by the earlier hand holding and want a more advanced book. If you are need the walkthroughs, you’ll likely struggle when you try to replicate the book’s techniques on your own site.

Exploring the Web

On the other hand, chapters 3-9 are, for the most part, very different.

These chapters don’t deal directly with Blogger as a service and, instead, deal with more broad topics such as social networking, widgets, Adsense and Google Analytics.

On the whole, these chapters only touch on Blogger when it is time to paste in the HTML code. This produces a strange repetition where the reader learns about a new service/tool, grabs the code, logs into Blogger and pastes the code. The latter two steps being almost identical in every case.

However, this isn’t to say that these chapters are bad, they are actually quite good. The book, in most cases, does a decent job explaining each tool and the walkthrough system makes sense. With only a few exceptions, users will be able to apply these chapters to their own sites whether or not they are a Blogger user.

The problem is that all of these chapters are already the subject of complete books and are much better served by them. Though sometimes you can summarize the important parts of a book in a chapter, a talk about Adsense with almost no discussion on optimization, for example, seems incomplete.

Of all of the chapters in the book, only the one on Google Analytics felt whole and that may be a symptom of my lack of experience with the service.

All in all, most people would likely be better served by getting books targeted at the services they are interested in rather than reading the brief overviews provided in this book.

Target Audience

In the preface of the book, the author says that it is targeted at “Current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Bloggers, and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger.”

This seems odd to me because most Blogger users that don’t already have heavily-customized blogs lack the HTML and CSS skills to take advantage of the Blogger-centric chapters. This is despite the author’s claim you don’t need any such skills to use the book.

Second, I don’t know too many people considering switching to Blogger. I am close to the target audience in that I am on a different platform and have dabbled with Blogger, but I am nowhere near considering a switch to it.

Finally, the choice of focus on company blogging is also odd as most companies prefer a self-hosted solution such as WordPress, MovableType or another platform. Outside of Google employees, I am hard pressed to think of company blogs that use Blogger.

The book just seems to be a poor fit for both the audience it claims to be for and strangely off topic for the service it is about.

Conclusions

Though I have been very negative about this book as I’ve reviewed it, I want to make it clear that I don’t think this is a “bad” book nor do I think that the author is a bad writer. Content from this book could easily be used to create five or six good books at a later date.

This is definitely an author I want to see more work from in the future.

However, this book makes the critical mistake of trying to be all things to all people. Though the topics it covers are indeed important for bloggers, it spreads itself too thin and fails to cover anything adequately.

This book would have much better served its target audience by focusing more on Blogger itself and less on outside services.

Personally, I think it is better to have a book that does one thing well than ten things with difficulty.

In the end, if you are a Webmaster reasonably efficient in HTML and CSS and are either using Blogger or considering the move, this may be a good book for you and I know of a few people that may describe.

However, I can’t shake the feeling that the audience is both small in nature and could have been better served by a refocusing of this book.

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But even though the law itself is generally well understood, that does not mean it is not abused. Some, either through accident or malice, file false DMCA notices and demand removal for content that is not infringing. Others, unwittingly sacrifice the protections the law provides by not responding appropriately.

Bearing in mind that I am not an attorney, it is worth taking a few moments to think about strategies for using and handling DMCA notices. Because, whether you receive one or have to send one, it is best to be prepared for what is expected of you.

Common DMCA Mistakes

There are many mistakes that you can make when sending a DMCA notice. Though most of these mistakes are pretty innocent and don’t cause any major problems, some can lead to serious legal issues and are worth taking special effort to avoid.

Though there is little research in this area, the most common DMCA mistakes I see are as follow:

1. Incomplete DMCA Notice: As mentioned in part one, a DMCA notice has several parts that must be completed before it can be considered a proper notice. Leaving out elements of a notice can result in it being ignored as the host has no obligation to assist. The best way to remedy this is to ensure you work from a good DMCA template.
2. Sent to Wrong Person: DMCA notices are meant to be sent to the host or, in some cases, the search engines. It is important to first locate the correct host and then the correct person at that company. The best way to find the host is by using Domain Tools and, once you know the host, locate the DMCA information on their home page. If you can’t find it there, the U.S. Copyright Office has a database of DMCA agents you can check.
3. Not the Copyright Holder: This is easily one of the most dangerous mistakes to make. Where others simply cost time, this has potential legal implications. If you are not the copyright holder of the work or a designated agent authorized to act on the behalf of the copyright holder, you can not file a DMCA notice. Though it is frustrating when dealing with spammers that are taking other people’s content, the safeguard is there for a good reason and failing to abide by this can cause problems both with the person you’re filing against and the copyright holder.
4. Use Not Infringing: Another very dangerous mistake is filing a notice where the use is not infringing. Cases that raise questions about fair use or issues of permission, such as cases where a contract exists, should not be resolved with a DMCA notice.
5. Filing Too Late: Finally, I’ve seen many cases where a DMCA notice is filed too late and the work is already removed. Though this is relatively harmless, it annoys DMCA and abuse agents. This is most common when a cease and desist letter is sent first, or at the same time, or a spam blog is shut down for other reasons.

While there are many other DMCA mistakes that can be made, these are the most common that I see. However, for the most part, they are easily avoidable if a few precuations are taken.

Pre-DMCA Checklist

To avoid these and other mistakes, it is wise to take a moment before sending a notice and ensure that everything is in order. Before sending any notices, one should check and ensure that you can answer yes to all of the following questions:

1. Am I the copyright holder?
2. Does the use clearly violate my license?
3. Is it clearly infringing (no fair use issues)?
4. Have I completely filled out my DMCA notice?
5. Have I located the host to the best of my ability?
6. Is the host within the U.S.?
7. Do I have the current DMCA agent for the host?
8. Are there no other ways I can report the site that might be better (spam, TOS violation, etc.)?
9. Would I be comfortable if this notice were published publicly (IE: Chilling Effects)?

Though the list is far from perfect, taking a moment to ensure the completeness and merits of your case can help ensure that you do not run afoul of the law and create more problems than you are solving.

After all, filing a DMCA notice does no good if it is ignored or, worse yet, comes back to haunt you.

On the Other End

The other side of the DMCA equation is what to do when you receive a DMCA notice or are the subject of one. The answer, is not simple and depends heavily on how you received the complaint. Typically, there are two scenarios:

1. You received the notice yourself, either as a cease and desist or as an actual DMCA notice.
2. Your host received a DMCA notice and is notifying you of it.

In the first case, the best thing you can do is comply with the notice, even if you think it is questionable. Complying with the notice not only helps protect you legally, but also shows a good faith effort to address the issue. Once the work is down, you can then talk the case over with an attorney and decide whether or not to restore the work.

If your host received the notice, there are three likely ways they have dealt with it:

1. Sent you the DMCA notice and trusted you to handle it. This is common with domain hosts and other paid hosting providers. These usually come with an ultimatum for you to remove the allegedly infringing material before they take action on your behalf.
2. They have removed the content themselves. Common at some free hosts and social networking sites.
3. They have suspended your site. Common at some larger domain hosts and some free sites, this is a situation where they suspend the site entirely. pending removal of the material in question by yourself.

In the first situation, which is by far the most desirable, you treat the notice as if you had received it yourself by complying with it and then analyzing the notice for validity. If you find that you weren’t running afoul of the law, you can file a counter-notice with the host and put the content back when they say it is ok.

The second situation is more difficult, you need to first check your site and make sure it is still up and running, minus the content in question. If your site is working, get a copy of the DMCA notice from the host, if a copy wasn’t provided, and evaluate it. If the notice is invalid or the content was not infringing, in the estimation of you and your attorney, you can then file a counter-notice with the host and have them put the content back.

The important thing though is to not put back the content yourself in these situations, even if you feel it is not infringing. Doing so could result in you becoming a “repeat infringing” and result in you being banned from the service, even if you technically did nothing wrong.

The final setting is the most difficult to deal with and the least desirable. To deal with it, you need to do the following things:

1. Get a Copy of the Notice: If you weren’t given a copy of the notice immediately, get one from your host and do so quickly.
2. Get Private Access to Your Site: Have your host enable access to your site via FTP or private backend so you can remove the material in dispute.
3. Remove the Material: Pull down the allegedly infringing material.
4. Notify Your Host: Let your host know that the work has been removed and ask them to restore the rest of your site.
5. Determine Validity of the Notice: If the notice is questionable, consult the matter with your attorney and consider filing a counter-notice if you get advice saying that it is safe.
6. Restore Work (If Applicable): Either have your host restore the content or do so yourself when they say it is acceptable. Once again, do not restore the work without confirmation that enough time has passed.

It is worth noting that, if you get enough copyright complaints filed against you, you could find that your account is suspended permanently with no recourse. Most hosts reserve this for infringers that repeat many times, but some have very low thresholds.

However, the bottom line, when dealing with dealing with a DMCA notice filed against you is to work with your host, whoever that might be, and not do anything independently without both the approval of your legal council and your host’s abuse team.

Conclusions

Proper use of the DMCA is all about proper procedure and following the steps laid out in the law. Problems mostly arise when the safeguards are not followed or people intentionally misuse the law to their own end.

If you follow the law as it is written, there is very little reason why it should come back to haunt you and, for the most part, even being the subject of a DMCA notice doesn’t have to be a total disaster.

If you know your rights and are prepared, you can both use the DMCA well and survive those that might seek to misuse it. It is simply a matter of having the understanding and being prepared for the worst.

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But the safe harbor provisions are also one of the least understood laws actively being used. Many do not understand exactly what the DMCA safe harbor protections do and what they protect protect. As such, they do not understand what their rights and obligations are under the law.

So we’re going to take a moment and analyze what the law actually says and how it applies to bloggers, both as content creators and as hosts, and look at how we can best use the law as it is written today.

Section 512(c): Web Hosts

It is worth noting that the DMCA does not use the term “host”, but rather, refers to “Information Residing on Systems or Networks at Direction of Users”, meaning content that was placed on the server by someone other than the administrator.

This means that the DMCA can not protect you from content that you post yourself or have editorial control over. It can only protect you from content posted by “users”, including subscribers (in the case of a paid hosting account), commenters or anyone else who puts material on a server without oversight.

Beyond that, the DMCA places several requirements on the site or service before they can claim safe harbor protection, those requirements include the following:

1. No Actual Knowledge: The administrator can have no actual knowledge that the material is infringing.


2. Removes Infringing Material: The host must remove infringing material expeditiously when properly notified.


3. Has No Direct Financial Benefit: If the host has the right to control the activity, then they can not receive any direct financial benefit from it.


4. A Designated Agent: Hosts should designate an individual, often the administrator himself or herself, to receive notifications of copyright infringement.


5. Contact Information Available: Finally, hosts have to make the information of their designated agent available both on their own site and by registering with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Of course, even among the largest hosts, exact compliance with the law is spotty at best. Some hosts don’t register with the USCO at all, others don’t put their complete information on their site. Others may gain some financial benefit while other sites may not move as quickly as possible to infringing works.

The truth is that most of these elements are relatively untested in the courts so it is unclear how much protection hosts lose by failing to comply with certain parts.

But if a host or a blogger or host wants to be as safe as possible, these are the requirements the law puts forth to ensure that they can not be held liable for infringement by users.

Section 512(d): Information Location Tools

The DMCA doesn’t just provide protection for services that unwittingly host infringing material posted by users, but also against sites that link to infringing material. The provision was designed to protect search engines and directories, but also expands to protect all providers who are “referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity.”

The provisions, however, are very similar to the requirements for hosts. Services that link must be unaware of the infringement, must not obtain any direct financial benefit from the infringement and act expeditiously to remove the infringing material once they are notified or otherwise become aware.

A strange difference, however, is that the requirements for “information location tools” do not state that a site has to designate a DMCA agent. However, it only makes sense that they should considering that they still have to receive notices and act on them.

Filing a Notice

Filing a DMCA notice is tricky. It requires determining who the host is, looking up their designated agent, usually on the hosts Web site, and then sending a properly formatted letter.

But while there are many tutorials to help you locate the host, contact them and stock letters you can use when you find the right address, it is important to be aware of the specific requirements of a DMCA notice to ensure that your get acted on in a timely manner.

1. Identification of Allegedly Infringed Material: Usually including URLs, titles or other information to help the host identify which works are being infringed.


2. Identification of infringing material: Usually including URLs to the where the infringing item(s) can be found.


3. Contact Information: A means for the host to contact you, usually including address, phone number and email address.


4. Good Faith Statement: A statement that you have a “good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”


5. Penalty of Perjury Statement: A statement that “the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”


6. Signature: A physical or electronic signature, which can take many formats.

Once the notice is filed and the work has been removed, the person the notice was filed against has the option of filing a counter-notice, which includes the same elements. However, it also requires that the person filing the counter notice consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal court in which they are located.

Protecting Yourself

When deciding if you want to obtain protection under the DMCA yourself, you need to first look at what you are currently doing and what your risks are.

Do you get a lot of comments from visitors that could be infringing? Do you run a forum or another community element where a lot of users posts? Do you link to a large volume of content that could be infringing without your knowledge?

If any of these things are true, and you are an American or your site is hosted with in the U.S., you may want to consider protecting yourself under the DMCA.

How far you go will depend on your case, but it is important, if nothing else, to be available to receive notices of infringement. Even if you don’t register your site or follow the law to the letter, being available will head off the vast majority of conflicts.

If people can not find you and have a copyright concern, they may decide to go over your head and work with your host directly, something that could result in the whole of your site being taken off line while things are sorted out.

Conclusions

As controversial as the DMCA safe harbor provisions are, they have actually made much of the Web we have today possible. Without the protections the DMCA affords hosts, it is unlikely that many of the sites and services we love would have been able to get off the ground.

Given both the power and the protection the law provides, it is worthwhile to take a moment and understand how the law works to ensure that it used correctly.

Simply put, bad uses of the law help no one and next week we’re going to discuss how to avoid sending bad DMCA notices and how to respond when you get one.

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Though the number of actions taken are still very small compared to the number of bloggers writing (Technorati was tracking over 70 million blogs at its last report), the threat of legal action is enough to scare many bloggers into changing the way they write, removing content or otherwise altering their site.

The problem is that, even if the image of bloggers being sued is an exaggerated one, the image of bloggers being threatened with such suits is much less so. For every lawsuit that reaches trial, there are dozens that are settled and for every one that is settled there are likely hundreds that are threatened, but never filed.

This has helped to create a climate of fear, one that bloggers need to be prepared for.

Arrests and Criminal Charges

As the ABC article points out, the danger you are in for arrest is almost directly related to the country you are operating in. If the country posts severe restrictions on access to the press and free expression, then criticizing the government can lead to an arrest.

But while these arrests may happen in Egypt, China and Iran, the countries cited in the article, they are almost unheard of in countries such as the U.S. However, there are still at least a few ways that a blogger the U.S. could find themselves in arrested for what they write. Some examples include the following:

1. Threats and Harassment: If you use your blog to frighten or intimidate others, there is a slew of potential criminal charges that could apply depending on the nature of what was said and the reason it was said.
2. Child Pornography: Obviously, any publication of what might be deemed child pornography could result in an arrest.
3. State Secrets: Equally obvious, giving out information that may jeopardize national security could also be cause for arrest.
4. Criminal Copyright Infringement: Though copyright infringement can become a criminal offense, it is unlikely that a blog will reach the required level. Most current criminal copyright infringement cases involving the Web in the U.S. have dealt with bittorrent trackers and other file sharing sites, not blogs, but it still is at least theoretically possible.

In short, while there are ways that you can be arrested for your blog, if you operate your site in good faith and avoid obvious legal issues, criminal charges are unlikely unless you live in a country where they are more common.

Still, it is important to know your rights and the boundaries the law sets before you in order to be certain that you do not run afoul of them. If you think that something you are considering could create a situation that you could be arrested for, it is wise to consult with an attorney before pressing the “publish” button.

Lawsuits and Civil Disputes

But while criminal cases involving bloggers are still very rare in most countries, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits are much more frequent.

The problem is that, while journalists have long studied media law as part of their education and training, most bloggers have not and are both unaware of their rights and the gray areas they have to avoid. Likewise, many people who feel that they were wronged may not understand the rights a blogger has and that they, the allegedly infringed, have no recourse.

This has set the stage for a lengthy series of legal scrapes, the bulk of which never result in a lawsuit being filed, where one or both parties do not fully understand their rights in the situation. These situations are dangerous and often lead to one or both parties unwittingly hampering their legal rights.

Though the ways that a blog could find itself are in legal trouble, the most common seen these days are the following:

• Copyright
• Defamation (libel)
• Privacy
• Trademark
• Trade Secrets

With that in mind, it is important that bloggers, big and small, to understand the law in these areas. Fortuantely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has assembled an excellent legal guide that covers most of these areas.

Best of all, the guide is in simple, easy-to-read English that explains these matters in Q&A format, making it a fast an informative read.

Conclusions

The simple truth is that there are many legal risks associated with blogging. Bloggers do get sued and many more are threatened with legal action.

But while many of these disputes are unavoidable, for the most part, one can avoid these types of disputes by operating in good faith, having a solid understanding of the law and knowing their rights.

But while there is no manditory course on media law for bloggers, there are many out there, including the EFF, who are willing to help you understand and empower yourself.

But while no one likes to take the time to study law, knowing your rights is an important part of blogging without fear and being the most effective blogger you can.

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