Last night Arrington reported the upcoming sale of MCHammer’s DanceJam. So far, nothing special, just another acquisition of an online website which was reported by Techcrunch. Another day and people are still dying of starvation and crime. Life goes on.

But there’s one small detail about this news: Arrington is investor in DanceJam. The investment was disclosed in the post, with a small pinch of *whine* as he announced that the company had not announced the sale to him nor did respond to his email request.

Arrington cashes in as early, angel, investor, but things become really interesting when looking at a long post about ethics and disclosure, written by Arrington more than half a year ago: The Rules Apply To Everyone. In the post the former lawyer went as far as saying that Dave Winer’s credibility was shot because he didn’t disclose a sponsored placement in a feed reader:

But it turns out Winer has a shady past when it comes to disclosing his own conflicts of interest. After his post yesterday, an ex-employee of his noted that Winer took at least one cash payment of $10,000 to promote a blog in a news aggregator he created. This wasn’t disclosed until the the person who paid blogged about it some time later.

Credibility = Shot. Permanently.

Arrington, who has previously admitted that he will promote his friends’ startups on Techcrunch is a guy who balances between two worlds: the world of ethical bloggers and the world of journalistic methods, when the latter is the better strategy to defend his case as we learned from Twittergate earlier this year.

And the DanceJam case is no exception to Arrington’s double standards. The tech blogger has done everything he always claims important by disclosing his conflict of interest, his investment in the company. But what he did forget was to stick to his own words, keep a promise he made more than half a year ago to get rid of the interest of conflicts by ditching his investments:

Back to transparency, one change I’m going to make at TechCrunch is to get rid of all of our investment conflicts. I’ve long been an angel investor and have continued to make a very few investments even after starting TechCrunch. These investments are always disclosed and in my opinion we do more than enough to maintain transparency there. But it’s also a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility. So over the next few months I’m going to divest myself of all of those investments in an orderly fashion, and I’ll update readers on the progress. I’ll also discontinue making any further investments.

As far as we know Arrington still is investor in Seesmic and has not gotten rid of any investment yet. This is where we can take the freedom to paraphrase Arrington’s paragraph about Dave Winer:

This is where the Spitzer phenomenon comes in. Arrington doesn’t see his breaking of a promise as an issue, disclosing his investment in DanceJam. Sorry Michael, but you aren’t above the ethical rules you so keenly shout about.

Credibility = Shot. Permanently.

Lesson learned: If you’re Arrington the rules don’t apply to you.

In a survey (which we all know is a really accurate way of finding out the truth…) Fox News discovered school deans who said they knew of students posting “unprofessional content” online.

Apparently:

Dr. Katherine Chretien of the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center, told Fox News that the real problem is that most medical schools lack guidelines on what’s acceptable for students to post online.

We’ve already seen that a lack of clear guidelines in the workplace can lead to confusion, particularly when employees fail to use common sense and discretion about what’s acceptable to share in a public online space.

One would really hope that medical students had enough sense to know, regardless of what policies may be in place, that it’s unacceptable to publish identifiable confidential information in any place, online or otherwise.

This hope leads me to conclude that the situation has been blown out of proportion, and that most if not all (aspiring) doctors aren’t sharing intimate patient details with the world.

As a commenter, Mark, states — and I’m inclined to agree with:

…When a doctor tweets “Sashay (or whoever) was in my office today and man he had a gross tumor on his face” that’s illegal and downright unethical.

A doctor tweeting “Had a long day, a couple colonoscopies and an ugly tumor removal that exhausted me” is TOTALLY acceptable. Granted we might not want to hear about that stuff but no patient information is revealed and the focus is really on the doctor is worn out.

No-one wants their personal details shared online, but I’m not convinced that this is really happening.

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.

The skills and qualities a company or blog owner is looking for from a blogger are extensive, far beyond just writing abilities. As with any freelance job, determining how to put a value on the time it really takes, and the costs associated with the time and production, is really hard when the real cost is in time, not materials. Bloggers should be paid for the time as well as their expertise and abilities. Are they? This is a problem that has been around for a very long time. How much is your time worth?

For many decades, professional editorial writers found a compromise on the time/value issue with payment by the word with a restriction on word count. I often was told, “We’ll pay you a dollar a word up to 1,000 words maximum.”

This meant the magazine, newspaper, newsletter, or other print publication had space for one thousand words that needed to be filled. Going over meant changing their magazine or newspaper design structure. Giving them less meant I’d be paid less, but somewhere in the middle was a compromise for both of us, usually in the form of me setting a minimum fee I was to be paid, no matter the word count, such as “I want $500 minimum for 700 words and a dollar a word thereafter.” If the article came it at 400 words, I would still be paid my minimum. If it crossed the 700 word mark, at which point I should have been paid $700 for a dollar a word, that’s when they have to start paying me the dollar a word rate. It wasn’t the best, but the companies felt like they were getting a deal and for the most part, I covered the minimum I needed to pay my rent and eat.

Here is a chart for the various traditional writer’s pay scale based upon a dollar amount per word. The more experience and expertise, the higher the fee per word.

Compare this to the word count of pay-per-post pay scales of today. If a blogger is paid $5 per 100 word post, they are paid 5 cents a word. If they are paid $100 per 100 word blog post, it brings the payment up to scale from 25 years ago. However, if they pass the 100 word mark, and most blog posts range from 200 to 500 words, the fee per word drops significantly.

What does this mean? With the change from a per word fee to a per post fee, bloggers have to work longer and harder to make any money on content generation alone.

With the pay-per-word scale, you were paid more for generating more content. With the pay-per-post model, the more content you write, the less you are paid. So it pays to write as little as possible and generate the most posts you can. While shorter tends to be better in web and blog writing styles, what quality of content can you offer consistently in 100 words or less?

The dollar-a-word pay scale took into account not just the time it took to type the word, but the research, editing, and experience and training it took to generate that word. The pay-per-post mass content generation process is about getting the most posts published in the shortest amount of time, the sweatshop mentality of blog content. The pay-per-post bloggers never make enough money to adequately compensate them for the time it takes to produce the content, thus they have to work longer and harder. So how much time does it take?

How Much Time Does It Take to Publish a Blog Post?

The average hours worked annually in the United States is 1777. The average household income is about $60,000 a year right now. To make that, you’d have to earn $34 an hour minimum. How many blog posts can you generate in an hour to come up to $34 an hour? How long does it take for you to generate a single blog post? And how many posts would you have to write across a year to meet that average income if you are a full-time blogger?

If your goal is to make $40,000 a year, you’d have to earn $23 an hour. If your goal is to make $30,000 a year, you’d have to earn $17 an hour.

In How Long Does It Take You to Write a Blog Post?, the responses were fairly consistent from 30 minutes to an hour for a single post. Longer posts take more time.

What is interesting is how people didn’t count the time they spent writing in their heads, composing and torturing the story idea, making notes, and processing the information and research before they actually started typing. That’s part of the work time that goes into writing and shouldn’t be discounted or dismissed. How do you account for that time? Many of us do our best thinking and writing in our heads while doing other things or sleeping. Still, the time it takes to jot down notes, read our feeds, uncover story ideas, and tug and pull at our stories is all part of the time it takes to write a blog post.

Remember the list of all the things a blogger does and is expected to do beyond just writing and generating content? I’d estimate that on a per-post basis, each post would consume 1-2 hours. Do you take that time into account as you calculate what you should be paid to blog?

There are 52 weeks in a year. Most paid bloggers need to produce a minimum of 3 posts a week. That’s 156 posts a year. Divide the annual average income of $60,000 by 156 posts, that’s $385 per post. Anyone getting paid that much to blog? I doubt it. Notch this up to 5 posts a week and you’d need 260 blog posts at $230 per post. That’s better but most bloggers are paid $$25 or less per post.

At $25 a post, you’d need to write 2,400 blog posts to earn $60,000 a year. How long would that take you? Do you have 2,400 original blog posts within you?

If your blogging business is only about generating post content, here is a chart to gauge how many posts you would have to create and sell in order to make whatever is your desired annual income level.

Those who make the most blogging don’t do it with pay-per-post unless they can get top dollar for their blog post content. Professional bloggers make money generating content on their own blogs combined with direct and indirect income sources such as advertising, speaking, ebooks, product sales, and consulting. This discussion isn’t about them, though. It’s about those who want to survive on blogging alone.

All this talk of income numbers is one thing. The core is how much time does it take to create and publish a blog post. Many workers are paid by the hour, so if you are paid $5.00 for a blog post and it takes you 15 minutes (.25 hours) to generate the blog post, that would be the equivalent of $20 an hour. Produce four blog posts at $5.00 an hour and you would get that $20. Ah, but that’s more work. Indeed. You work 15 minutes to produce a $5 post and not have any other posts within that hour, you are still paid only $5. You have to generate four posts in that hour to make the $20.

What if it takes you 30 minutes? Then your pay scale would drop to $10 an hour for a $5 post. If it takes you two hours to publish a $5.00 blog post, that’s $2.50 an hour. For the United States, that’s way below minimum wage. It’s not looking so good any more.

If you are paid $100.00 per post and it takes you two hours to develop the concept, research the story and materials, write the post, edit it, prepare it for publishing, find an image to accompany the post, publish it, then respond to comments and maintain the post over time, and include time for networking and promotion, you would be paid $50.00 an hour, a much more reasonable rate for an expert blogging specialist.

These calculations take a generalized look at the comparisons to help you get a picture of how much you are worth as a blogger, how much time you have to spend blogging to earn enough money, and to determine if you are being paid enough.

If you are an expert in your subject matter, you might be getting paid $50 to $100 an hour for consultation or service fees. To be paid less than that to take the time away from your business to write a blog post has to be offset against the return on that investment of time. If it brings in more business, then a lower blogging fee would be acceptable. If it doesn’t, then your time might be better invested elsewhere, like on your own blog generating business and only occasionally guest blogging. You have to explore the number to see if they make sense – and enough money – for your needs. It’s all about the return on your investment (ROI) on time and energy as well as money.

Let’s look at some more time calculations. If it takes 30 minutes to write a blog post, to write 156 posts would take 78 hours. To write 260 blogs in 30 minutes each, it would take 130 hours. To write 2,400 posts, it would take 1,200 hours, coming close to full time work of 1777 hours a year, not counting the time it takes to read and respond to comments, network, promote, and all the many other tasks involved in blogging.

Is 30 minutes a blog post a realistic time frame? It often takes an hour or more to generate a single blog post, especially by a professional writer concerned with editing and making the content the best possible. Here are some estimates on how long it would take to generate the number of posts per week based upon how long it takes to write and publish the post.

Some posts take only a few minutes, but others take much longer. These numbers are just a general guide to help you determine how much time it takes to generate blog content on average.

How Much Are You Paid to Blog?

Bloggers love their independence, their freedom to work when and where they want, but at what price? The hours are long and hard. As the NY Times reported, it is becoming a serious sweatshop industry to generate the volumes of content demanded by the ever-growing web.

To make the average annual US income of $60,000, you need to make $34 an hour. If you are paid $5 a blog post, you would have to write 12,000 blog posts. At $25 a blog post, you would have to publish 2,400. For $50 per post, that’s 1200 posts. At $100 per blog post, you would have to generate 600 posts.

I’ve only touched lightly on the price paid by those who work so hard for so little. Bloggers rarely see the inside of an office, which overjoys many of them, but the relationships that are formed within a work environment are denied them. Still, many stay-at-home parents are thrilled to be able to work and control their hours as well as take care of their family. I know of a growing number of bloggers dependent upon blogging income (and their online social life) while they stay at home or work only part-time to care for elderly parents.

As a freelancer and contractor, there is little room for advancement when you blog for someone else. You don’t get regular pay raises and have to beg for increases in your blog fee at a time when many are paying less and less and advertising income is dropping. You have to chase down jobs and prove your worth over and over again.

There are also legal issues to consider such as the rights and usage of the sold blog posts. Who owns them? Who dictates what will happen to them after they are published? What about syndication and reprint rights? Can the blog owner do whatever they want with the posts after they’ve been published?

What about copyrights? Who owns the content after it’s been published? Will the copyright ownership remain with the blogger or go to the blog owner? Will the blog owner protect the rights of the content and help the blogger defend copyright violations?

What about maintenance and upkeep of older blog posts once the blogger leaves the blog? Who is reponsible? It is still work representing the blogger’s quality of work and reputation. Who is responsible for maintaining those?

Blogging for a living is definitely not for everyone. If you are a talented writer and understand the hard work, discipline, and endurance test that blogging can be, there is money to be made and a lot of companies are desperate to hire quality writers and bloggers.

If you want to blog for a living, don’t take just any blogging job or low paying jobs. It isn’t worth it. Get paid what you are worth so every blogger within the industry can get a chance to make a decent living and not be undercut by those blogging for $5 a post. Consider your expertise and ask for what you deserve.

In the next article in this series, I’ll be addressing the issues of what businesses need to know about hiring bloggers. Many companies think they need blogs, but don’t have the staff to maintain and produce blogs, so they are hunting. Unfortunately, they are hunting within a new industry of writers and thinkers who don’t behave in accordance with traditional working standards.

Blogger Jobs Article Series

• Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?
• Blogger Jobs: How to Apply For a Blogger Job?
• Blogging Jobs: How Much is Blogging Worth?

Its director, Gareth Thomas, said that, “Most people don’t know about this law,” adding, “there is a misconception that these devices are clever, but they can backfire.”

The new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations legislation came into effect at the end of May 2008.

Drew Benvie, director at Hotwire, said, “This law change affects everyone in PR. If customers have any presence online, it’s definitely their business to know about it.”

(Via PR Week)

It was brought to my attention this weekend that every Boing Boing post (except one) with my name in it is gone. It might have happened a while ago, and no, I have no idea what’s going on. How do you even ask someone about something like that? Personally, I never delete posts for any reason so I just think it’s really weird.

Valleywag broke the story, with no real explanation as to why, and so far nothing from the Boing Boing people. They do point out that it isn’t some new anti-sex policy, since recent content still is playful enough. So what happened?

Also: Is this happening frequently? This post certainly raises questions, doesn’t it? We’ll try to follow up on this one as answers subside. One thing’s for sure though, this isn’t the way to play the game in the blogosphere, not even for a bigshot like Boing Boing.

Finding such negative information about ABC was not our goal. We were looking for technical articles and had to wade through post titles like Overcoming ABC Frustrations, If You Want Technical Support Don’t Ask ABC, Why Teachers Hate ABC, When ABC is More Trouble Than Your Students, The Battle to Convince the School Board to Not Use ABC, Why We Hate ABC, and so on.

Frustrated with using the program herself, my client was stunned by the number of public complaints and negative rants. Stepping back to reconsider, she finally said, “Let’s change our parameters. Let’s research if WordPress integrates with a similar program, one without the bad reputation.” Once she returned to her office, she would put my project to develop a proposal to stop using this very costly program for her university and transition the school to a better program.

All because of an unrelated simple keyword search, ABC would lose over a hundred thousand dollars a year from this university now convinced that this isn’t the way to go.

While this huge economic decision was influenced by search engine results, results which may not truly reflect the quality and integrity of the program, online reputations are made and broken by what people uncover through their searches. Are you paying attention to your online reputation for your blog, business, and life?

What Can Be Found on the Web About You and Your Blog?

What can people uncover about your, your blog, or your business when they hit the search engines? Sometimes you have to type in specific words to turn up specific topics, but when a general, unrelated search brings in more bad news than good, there is a message there worth investigating.

Everything you do on the web, from leaving a comment to playing around with social media, leaves an trail on the web that anyone can follow, including those unfamiliar with CSI techniques.

Who searches for your online reputation? Potential clients, employers, friends, family, and anyone you’ve had contact with can search for information about you on the web. More importantly, people often make value judgments from information gained from unrelated searches that turn up bits and pieces of information that can sway an opinion on a subject, company, or person.

In Do You Monitor Your Online Reputation, I covered ways of researching your online reputation, but I want you to think about it consciously starting today. Everything you do online is recorded and stored. Everything. The things you do when you are 12 and discovering the magic of IM chats and the Internet, and things you do online when you are 40 and looking to move into a new career or business.

For the next two, three, maybe even ten generations or more, Big Brother is not just the government watching and recording everything we do. We are the modern Big Brother. Watching a CSI rerun recently, the detective asked another policeman to confiscate all cell phones from the crowd standing around a car accident. The cop refused, arguing that no one would turn over their cell phones. The other man called to the crowd, “If you have taken any photographs or videos of the accident, the first ones to turn them over to this officer will get their video featured on the eleven o’clock news.” Dozens of cell phones and cameras were handed over from the crowd. Cell phone cameras are everywhere, recording big events and day-to-day events all the time, and most of these are uploaded to the web, preserved for all time.

Our blogs tell our stories, sometimes becoming a diary where we share more than we should. Our comments are mini resumes, often telling the world a lot about who we are and how we think. You can delete the post, comment, or even the blog, but somewhere, there is a record of that content, just waiting to be uncovered.

Blog and use the Internet wisely. The world is searching and paying attention. What you publish publicly is your new resume. Let it speak well of you.

Related Articles

• Are You Who You Blog You Are?
• Selling Your Blog: What Are Blog Buyers Looking For?
• Building Blog Relationships: Reaching Out
• Linking Relationships
• The Selflessness of Top Bloggers
• The Art of Guest Blogging: Blog Your Best Writing
• What Is the Return on Your Investment in Social Media?
• What Do You Put in the Name of a Comment Form?
• Give Credit When Credit is Due: Skip The Middle Man
• The Blog is Mightier Than The…
• Improve My Site: Why I Returned The Money From a Paid Web Consultancy Job
• Improving Your Blog: The Google Game
• Want. Want. Want. Blogging is About Giving.
• The Art of the Artist Web Design Collaboration
• Banging the Pots and Pans on Your Blog
• What You Don’t Know About Blogging Can Hurt You
• What Do You Want? One-Shot Traffic Versus Easy Conversion
• Is It the Responsibility of a Blogger to Set a Standard?

From the stories people have shared, blocks and bans can happen from a variety of sources, not just from within a country. Blocks are in place within businesses, libraries, educational institutions, hotels, and even Internet cafes.

When a friend asked me how would she know if her blog was blocked from any potential readers, I thought it was a question worth investigating. How do you know if your blog is blocked or banned?

How Do You Know If Your Blog is Blocked?

Blog and website bans and blocks happen due to legal decisions against a specific blog, or a blog service, such as all Blogspot and WordPress.com blogs being blocked due to the challenges in blocking subdomains. Internet Providers can choose to block specific types or categories of sites to protect their users, whether or not their users understand that these types of sites may be inaccessible. The Great Firewall of China is an example of a government imposing restrictions on their citizens as to what they can access via the web. Businesses and educational institutions install software and firewalls which also prevent access to specific sites and online services to “protect” their employees or students, as well as preventing time-wasting, non-business related Internet use.

So how do you know if your block is blocked through any of these types of blocks?

Most bloggers learn through the news which general groups of blogs are being banned or blocked. WordPress.com announced bans in Turkey and Brazil, and China has been a long running battle, along with occasional bans in other Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Google Blogspot/Blogger blogs are banned consistently or from time to time in China, Pakistan, Turkey, India, and other countries as well as in libraries, schools, and businesses. MySpace, Facebook, and other social blogging and networking services are often blocked or banned by countries, businesses, and educational institutions. Even Google or some Google tools such as email are banned. Word spreads from news reports and word-of-mouth alerting you to whole groups of people having trouble accessing your site if you are on one of those services and not self-hosted.

A friend living in one of those places or working for a specific business or school may alert you personally when they can’t access your blog, too. Some are using Twitter to ask those in China and other sites which often ban blogs to test their sites manually to see if their blogs are blocked.

If you have friends, family, co-workers, or potential readers in China, the odds are that your blog is blocked, though it might not be. China is notorious for blocking tons of blogs, news, and informational sites with the Great Firewall of China, including blocking access to Technorati and Wikipedia. According to the China Web2.0 Review, estimates are that by the end of 2008, there will be 99 million blogs in Chinese, most of them based in China, which could put pressure on the government to open up the Great Firewall of China, though hopes are dim.

Beyond the news and word-of-mouth, how do you know if your blog is banned?

Blogs Banned by Web Security and Filtering Programs

If you work in a corporation or educational institution, you can manually check if your blog (or a friend’s) is banned or blocked by trying to access it from there. Or visit your local library and try accessing your blog. If your blog is blocked from these sites, the odds are that it is blocked by many company, educational institution, or government using a commercial blocking and filtering program.

Many companies invest in protective blocks and filtering programs, like WebSense, that deny access to specific sites or sites with specific keywords. BoingBoing is a frequent target of such bans, as are many technical, educational, and legal sites. Not long ago, blogger David Byrne blogged about having been blocked from BoingBoing from the Denver International Airport, and I and many attending the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) this year were blocked from Gmail, WordPress.com, and other sites through the free hotel WIFI, so these blocking programs can be found anywhere.

These programs look for features that make the site “restricted” for access such as forums, blogs, social networks, bookmarks, interactivity, and keywords like sex, porn, terrorism, and even words like censor and censorship. A title like my blog post, Designing a Rainbow – Sexy Hot Colors, has been reported banned from access occasionally, though generally my site is banned because it is a blog and on WordPress.com, a double whammy strike-out for some.

They categorize sites and then the company administrator decides which categories to block. They can block all newsgroups, public email services, gambling, personal sites, and choose from a wide variety of other classifications. But who chooses which category your site is in, and how do you know which category your site is in?

Two sites that report on the review and category status of your site, which may impact your blog’s category for inclusion or exclusion from web blocking and filtering programs are Lightspeed Systems and Blue Coat.

Blue Coat reported Lorelle on WordPress in the Newsgroups/Forums category and offered an easy method for me to change it to Education with the secondary category as Blogs/Personal Sites, not the best options but the options don’t cover Technical Writing or a better category for my blog.

Lightspeed Systems rates Lorelle on WordPress as R-Rated Content:

May be suitable for high schoolers under the supervision of an adult. Includes adult material, drugs, violence, gambling, un-moderated forums, social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, blogs, and dating.

I’m horrified by that categorization, especially grouped with drugs, violence, and adult material. Not very forward thinking to classify blogs accordingly. I requested a manual review, explaining that my blog does not feature adult content but educational and technical articles, with a little slap to expand the blog category beyond R ratings.

To determine your blog’s category with Websense, you must register as a user and use their Site Lookup Tool to check your blog. If the categorization is incorrect, you can use the Websense Suggest a URL option to submit a new category for your blog and await a response. Most people report a favorable response, though some have to jump through more hoops to get their categorization changed if there is doubt.

How to You Know If Your Blog is Blocked Internationally?

China uses Websense and other strong filtering programs to create the Great Wall of China, but how do you know if your blog can be accessed from China?

Digital Inspiration offers How to Check If Your Website Is Blocked In China or Not and China blocking Blogger blogs During the Olympics as guides to determine if your blog is blocked in China by checking to see if your blog will pass the “ping” test. If you get a report of “Packets lost” to the China servers, the odds are that your site is blocked in China. The services include Just Ping, Watch Mouse, and Website Pulse.

Search the web for ping testing servers in other countries to test your blog’s URL and see if they pass the test, thus may be accessible from within the country.

What Do You If Your Blog is Banned?

Among the many sites blocked by Websense have been Amnesty International, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, The Shoah Project, Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania, DisabilityGuide.org, Dignity of Victims Everywhere, John Dvorak, and Autism Behavioural Intervention Queensland, classified under their various category systems as gambling and sex sites. As mentioned, if your blog has been classified inappropriately, you can contact Websense and other filtering services to get your classification changed.

When a government or large corporation or institution blocks your blog, there is little you can do about it. While I would love to have everyone potentially blocked by China send emails and letters to the Chinese government formally requesting their sites be unblocked, it isn’t likely to have an impact, though such a grassroots effort might help.

However, for institutions with more open minds, a politely written formal request to unblock your site might help open your site to their demographics.

The request should be sent via snail mail rather than email, as that tends to carry greater weight. Find the single person or department head that is best placed to address your request by contacting the company and asking. Include one to three printed article samples showcasing the general subject matter of your blog and a single page formal letter outlining the ban and the reasons your site should be removed from the ban list.

Has your blog been banned? How did you find out and what did you do about it?

The best and brightest minds of the legal and technical worlds have failed to come up with solutions to stem the flow of junk email, splogs or spam comments.

Every new law or technological advancement has just been an escalation in a never-ending arms race between the many who hate spam and the few that send it out.

To be certain, spam plays a much smaller part in our lives today than it did a few years ago. We rarely see spam in our inboxes, spam comments are largely filtered out and only search spam seems to work with any reliability, especially with blogs.

However, the junk content keeps flowing at an ever-increasing rate. More and more junk email gets sent out every year, comment spam is on the rise too.

We have managed to treat the symptoms, but not the illness. This is because we have been dealing with how spam mails us, one issue at a time rather than looking at the bigger picture.

It is time to take a look at the spam puzzle and how it all fits together.

Nothing in a Vacuum

The problem is that spammers do not rely on one or two techniques to make their money. In fact, spammers routinely caution one another against relying on any one method too heavily as the door could be shut on the technique tomorrow.

The entire spammer system is built upon being able to survive shifts and changes. As such, they routinely use multiple techniques to achieve the same end. A comment spammer likely also scrapes RSS feeds, builds spam blogs, post forum spam and/or sends junk email.

Though not all spammers employ all techniques, most employ at least a few. It is the only way to ensure long-term viability when people are working around the clock to stop you.

Worse still, the attacks are often related. A comment spam effort may be used in tandem with a spam blog’s push to build search engine ranking for a particular site. Cracking a CAPTCHA system, such as Google’s may be used to both post spam blogs on BlogSpot and send email spam via Gmail

In the world of spammers, nothing happens in a vacuum. Spammers are constantly using a variety of techniques and routinely branching out farther. For example, the bot networks we routinely hear about being used to send email spam are often also used to send comment spam and to scrape blogs. This makes such spammers both harder to detect and hard to stop.

This hydra-like approach to spam makes spammers, especially the more prolific ones, very hard to completely stop and ensures that, with every approach they take, they bring only the best tools and techniques.

We have to be smarter if we are going to fight back against it.

Cooperation is Key

One of the major problems the good guys are having is that no one is talking to anyone else. Those tracking email spam aren’t talking with those battling the Web spammers, who aren’t talking to the anti-comment spammers and so forth.

There is no system in place for engaging in such cooperation and little interest in doing so. Simply put, everyone is interested in solving the problem they’ve been set forth to do and spammers are free to knock on doors until something lets them through.

This is an issue even within the same company. For example, reporting a spam blog to Google may get it removed from the index, but does not guarantee that it will get its BlogSpot account cut, lose its Adsense or even ensure that messages containing the URL are filtered in Gmail.

While it is possible to deliver major setbacks to spammers, it is almost impossible to completely destroy their operations. Like a tree with a few branches cut, the other branches can keep the tree alive until everything grows back.

For the most part, spammers have learned to cope with the frustrations thrown up by their opponents through a combination of flexibility and sheer numbers. If the anti-spammers were to work together, then no amount of flexibility could save them.

Conclusions

Spammers have always been best at exploiting the flaws of the Web.

They’ve relied on the fact that computers can throw up junk content faster than humans can pull it down. They’ve exploited the reality that if you send out enough email, some will escape the filters and a handful of gullible people will make purchases. They’ve enjoyed the simple truth that there are many bloggers and forums where they can post their comments without fear of filtering or reprisal.

We may never be able to stop this problem, bad people will always do bad things, especially on the Web. But we may be able to do better than just survive.

It is time to fight back against the spammers by depending less on technology and more on human cooperation. Though making it happen would require a level of partnership that has never been seen before, it could drastically alter the spam fight.

It may just be a dream, but it is one worth considering.

In a similar, but much more famous case, J.K. Rowling has sued one of her fans, the author of the Harry Potter Lexicon site, in order to prevent a book from being published using information from her series.

These are just two examples of creators butting heads with their own fans over matters of copyright. Ever since the Internet made the fan site possible, it seems that copyright holders have struggled to find where to draw the line with their own fans and fans, for their part, have had difficulty finding just where that line is.

But how can such bloggers fan site creators avoid drawing the ire of those that they admire? What can copyright holders due to avoid needless clashing with their own fans? Sadly, copyright law is of little help in this area and the real key lies in making an honest attempt to resolve a very complicated matter.

The Problem With Fan Sites

Fan sites, by their very nature, use intellectual property from the entities they wish to pay homage to. Whether it is a trademarked name/logo or copyrighted content, it is very difficult to run a fan site without using at least some portions of the original works.

The problem is that this use of original works can often cross the line of what would be typically considered fair use and can delve into outright copyright infringement. Many common things fans do, such as create fan fictions of a popular series, buy domains containing the title of the work or build sites using original artwork, can be considered infringing activities.

Copyright holders, not wanting to hamper the thriving fan community, generally take a lenient attitude toward such infringements. Many, such as Blizzard with World of Warcraft, create fansite kits to promote the creation of such sites. Most also tolerate fan fiction for non-commercial purposes and others offer clips and passages for posting on fan sites and blogs.

But this balance can lead to serious problems down the road. Fans can go too far, believing they have ethical and legal rights that don’t exist, and copyright holders, used to setting terms for their audience, try to control every use they didn’t intend.

The result is that, as unpleasant as it is, authors, movie makers and musicians often find themselves in conflict with their fans over intellectual property. But while suing ones fans is never pleasant, nor good for publicity, it is a step that many feel they have to take.

Avoiding Conflict

Avoiding awkward situations, such as the one at the Harry Potter trial, requires an effort from both the copyright holders and their fans. Without cooperation from both sides, lines are inevitably going to be crossed and likely with dire consequences.

Specifically, copyright holders should consider the following:

• Post Clear Guidelines: Fansite kits and other tools are great steps, but more important is a clear set of guidelines for how fan sites can use copyrighted material. Broad, easily understood and accessible guidelines are the most powerful tools for preventing awkward situations. It is almost always better to speak the unspoken rules than trust that they are understood.
• Anticipate Unforeseen Uses: As technologies change, predict unforeseen uses of your content by fans and approach them with the same spirit the guidelines were created in. Being heavy-handed does no good when it is out of step with your other policies.
• Communicate Openly: It is important to communicate openly with your fans. If one crosses a line, before sending a cease and desist, try to find a productive arrangement. Being hostile across the board only creates more tension.

Fans, of course, have their responsibilities as well. It is easy, in the rush of building a fan site or blog, to completely neglect the copyright and other intellectual property issues that can bring headaches later.

As such, I strongly recommend the following steps:

• Avoid Trademarked Domains: The issues with trademark and domain names are notoriously sticky and can come back to haunt you at any time. Avoid slogans, names and titles that are protected under trademark law when picking your domain.
• Follow Posted Guidelines: As copyright holders need to post such guidelines, fan sites need to adhere to them. Every fan community operates under a different set of rules and guidelines so it is important to read what information is available and adhere to it.
• Avoid Commercial Use: Though commercial use may not be a huge factor in determining fair use, it is a line that many copyright holders would rather their fans not cross. Avoid running ads or selling merchandise without the explicit approval of the copyright holder.
• Establish Contact: The most successful fan sites almost always establish contact with representatives from the copyright holder and have an ongoing dialog with them about copyright and other relevant matters. Such a contact can help the site in many different ways, not just copyright.
• Follow the Community’s Lead: In the absence of good contact or published guidelines, locate sites in the community that have been around for some time and are very successful. Follow their rules for using copyrighted material and contact them to find out what they know. Though it is not a legal defense, most likely such sites are operating with at least an understanding from those holding the rights.

All in all, it comes down to a matter of mutual respect. Fans need to be aware of copyright and other intellectual property issues when building their sites and copyright holders need to understand that some element of infringement is necessary for building a good fan community. Striking a good balance is never easy, especially since these topics are always difficult to talk about, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Conclusions

Fan sites have always been one of the more interesting, and difficult, areas of copyright law. It is an area where the law is often especially vague, emotions run high and conflict is almost predestined. Though the upcoming J.K. Rowling ruling may help shine some light on the legal standing of such fan works, most would prefer to work with the artists they enjoy, not hide from them in a legal gray area.

On the other side, copyright holders would much rather nurture the fan community and encourage the development of a fan presence as it helps promote their work and the related goods. This spirit of cooperation creates a rare opportunity for both sides to work together, something rarely seen in intellectual property law.

As such, it behooves both sides to take advantage of this good will and work together. Other copyright holders may never get that chance and most would feel lucky if their greatest intellectual property issue came from well-intended fans.

If both sides can approach these matters in good faith and discuss these issues like adults, then everyone can walk away happy and we never have to read about the big name artist taking her fan to court for crossing a perceived line.