Category: Blog

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Content Theft Worsens

If you follow my comment feed, then you may have noticed that I am getting huge amounts of trackback spam. Why not just turn off trackbacks? Because these people are stealing my content, and likely your content, for their own personal gain and the trackback is the easiest way to find them. Yes, they generate a link back to Reality Me which in theory should help my page rank but not when it is with duplicate content. I have installed the Antileech WordPress plugin but I am still figuring out how to use it without cutting off my feeds to legitimate readers. If you do end up getting a "this content is stolen" message instead of the actual post, please email juggler at gmail.com and I will fix it. That said, can you confirm which feedreader you use based upon the following:

  • Blogdigger/2.0 (http://www.blogdigger.com/; contact@blogdigger.com) Referred by: http://www.zimbio.com/Jaycees/trackers/7/Blog+Search+Tracker
  • Feedfetcher-Google; ( http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 6 subscribers; feed-id=3701543567382179734) Referred by: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
  • Feedfetcher-Google; ( http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 9 subscribers; feed-id=8604077678671105327) Referred by: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my
  • Feedster Crawler/3.0; Feedster, Inc. Referred by: http://ranchero.com/
  • Gregarius/0.5.4 ( http://devlog.gregarius.net/docs/ua) Referred by: http://blognetwork.knoxnews.com/feed.php?channel=81
  • Liferea/1.4.3b (Linux; en_US.UTF-8; http://liferea.sf.net/)
  • NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http:/www.newsgator.com; 1 subscribers) Referred by: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx?fld=0
  • NewzCrawler/1.8 (compatible; MSIE 6.00; Newz Crawler 1.8; http://www.newzcrawler.com/ )
  • SharpReader/0.9.7.0 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.2407; WinNT 5.1.2600.0) Referred by: http://127.0.0.1:12108/sharpreader/page.html
  • Wasabot/1.4 (+ http://www.wasalive.com ) Java/1.6.0_02

I am assuming that Blogdigger, Gregarius, and Wasabot are used by content thieves.

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Is $1000 for someone else not worth YOUR time?

I am really enjoying participating in The Problogger Birthday Bash Darren Rowse and Lara Kulpa have put together. I do find it a little troubling that when they offered a prize of $1000 to your favorite charity it only generated 24 qualifying entries! Now turn it around. Instead of offering a decent sum of money for someone else, offer a $20 gift certificate for yourself and they got 724 comments! (not all of those would have been qualifying but I’m not going to count). Granted, there was a prize in that post which could have gotten you $500 for yourself but winning any other prize did not disqualify you from entering the charity giveaway. Every single Problogger reader should have entered the charity giveaway!

Ok. Let me get off my soap box and add in a little rationality.

  1. The money for self contest required no effort, just a comment under the post itself with as little as one word in it, so it makes sense that the number participants would be far greater.
  2. We assume that every reader of Problogger, due to its subject matter, has a blog BUT that could be a false assumption; ergo, the participation in the money for self would be higher.
  3. Not everyone is into charities. And that’s ok. So the participation in the money for self would be higher.
  4. The charity post required a little substance and effort. Unfortunately, effort and substance do knock a lot of people out of the game. Therefore, the money for self would be naturally higher.

All that said, it does make sense that some of the other contest posts would generate more comments. But only 24 valid entries for giving $1000 away to a meaningful cause?! Surely we should have done better than that! Karthik shares my sentiment.

Life is a participation sport. Get up! Participate! Be active in your community. Vote! Go to school board meetings. Pick up trash. Bring a shopping cart into the grocery with you instead of leaving it in the parking lot. Say hi to your neighbor. Hug someone daily! Volunteer your time. Leave a legacy. Make a difference!

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My Entry to the Problogger iPod giveaway

My entry for Problogger’s 6th giveaway is:

iBlog for iMust

I met a guy from Oz
Tim Miller his name
Of SpyJournal fame
We have never met in person
But are friends all the same

See I was trying out
This fad call blogging
Tim said its more than a game
Blogging is not a fad
It’s here to stay

People make a living
In this digital world
Publishing their own word
Tim advise, “Check out problogger
A site by Darren Rowse.”

Problogger showed the way
Follow these rules
And you can make your pay
In the comfort of pajamas
Sitting at your computer all day

I have yet to make a dime
But Darren must be doing ok
For it’s Problogger’s birthday
And good ol’ Darren
Is giving $54,000 away

Remember, they just needed a poem with the word "problogger" or "Darren" in it. The poem did not have to be a literary masterpiece although there are a couple of gems! At the time of this post, Darren Rowse and Lara Kulpa had 416 entries for their iPod giveaway which includes 4 iPods and 1 iPod makeover. You still have 4 hours to enter.

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I had a blast at the Orchestra!

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Let me tell you. Maestro Lucas Richman is cool! I mean he’s just fun to be around. Stand beside him and you just feel better. Hug him and you won’t need your Prozac for a year! Top all that off with an energy on the stage that is captivating to watch. (I did joke with him that I thought there were a couple of times he was just plain having fun and perhaps channeling Jack Black.) Today’s featured performer was Jeffrey Biegel. He’s a pleasure also. He has personally worked with two of my heroes, Pete Fountain and Jerry Louis! To be in the same room with such talent as Maestro Lucas Richman and Jeffrey Biegel is very humbling. To banter with them almost felt like a breach of social protocol but we did get to share some laughs.

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I have an official review of my evening at the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra to get from mind and paper to blog post but I think I am a bit too tired to be coherent tonight. If you don’t want to wait, in short, if you don’t make time to go see the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, you need to make the the time! I can come up with all sorts of reasons to not go-the kids, money, deadlines, blah blah (just excuses!)-, but honestly, what a great way to spend an evening! Details tomorrow (or maybe Saturday).

Bloggers I saw tonight included Frank Murphy (review), Lissa Kay (review), Rich Hailey, Doug and Faye McDaniel, Byron Chesney (his review), Tish, Craig Thomas and Noah Caldwell. Who did I miss? The bloggers had 50 tickets allocated!

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WARNING ON BLOGRUSH!

I was reading 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free and liking the suggestions. Perhaps it would be fun to promote a little extra traffic to the site. I despise watching websites get overloaded with Javascript widgets and gizmos. However, I am guilty of doing that to Reality Me. It is bogged down with useless, behind the scenes Javascript. My list of round tuits includes cleaning up Reality Me and Domestic Psychology. Things like RobotReplay and PhpMyVisites are no longer of use to me but they remain behind the scenes slowing the site down. The Twitter widget and the MyBlogLog widget I find enhancing to the functionality of the site. I see Google Analytics as a necessary evil and I still debate the value of Adsense on a blog such as Reality Me (although apparent it protects – Can someone help me find that citation? I think Michael Silence carried it a while back. Some law was passed saying that if you run ads on your website you are protected the same was as traditional journalists.).

When I read 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free, BlogRush was in the number one or two position. I should have taken a warning when I noticed the author was not using a referral link. Today I noticed that the Javascript code I put in my sidebar to validate Reality Me with Blogrush had changed from a box of links to other sites to become a Google Adsense box. Now, I have Google ads that run on Reality Me (when the ad isn’t encouraging you to buy the shirt off Cathy’s back) so I think Blogrush put me in danger of being in violation of my TOS with Google. Granted, I was supposed to read the Blogrush TOS and I’m sure they revealed that putting ads on my site is part of the agreement. But I do not agree with that! So I will be parting company with Blogrush. I wonder what is in the #3 position on 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free?

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Don’t you have better things to do?

I blog a lot. Apparently I’m a noisy Twitter also. Some people take smoke breaks. I publish something. I am a juggler. A natural born multi-tasker. When I get some code block, I distract myself with a post then usually I can get back into the grind. Since I work constantly, and strange hours, I am at the keyboard perpetually which lends to being able to produce more posts. Blogging is not something that detracts from my day nor consumes quantities simply because I have built blogging into the rhythm of my life.

Last week I said some things in jest which offended Cathy … fill in some blanks … we got angry with each otherapparently only I got mad and I quit posting. The quantity of work on my plate was inhuman (and light compared to the ungodly amount on my plate this week). I withdrew from everything but work which probably wasn’t a terrible thing. But it knocked my rhythm out of whack. My blogging habit broke. I’ll get it back in sync but it may not be until next week after this work is done. If I survive this week and October I’m seriously thinking of taking November or December off completely.

Btw, Cathy and I have since made up. Married people know what that means.

As an interesting sidebar, I thought with no posting my readership would vanish. According to Google Analytics the number of visitors increased!

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Tell Me What You Like To Read

I have always stated that I blog for my own pleasure but my web logs and stats programs tell me that I also blog for a handful of regular readers. What do you like to see at Reality Me? Do you find posts like No it doesn’t grow on trees to be

  1. repulsive
  2. funny
  3. TMI
  4. a reason to delete my rss feed from your reader
  5. the impetus to call for an intervention and have me hauled off to Lake Shore

Do you like seeing pictures, videos, stories of my past, details of my present, technical writing, the children, audio posts? What floats your boat? I’ll still write for me but I will happily fine tune my writing for you also!

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Scoble is an Idiot

All bloggers are idiots! The first line of Why I Blog says "blogging is stupid." Why?

We paint targets on ourselves and encourage friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers to make comments which, depending on our mood, may hurt our feelings or cause us to make a flippant remark in jest or anger that changes our relationship with those commenters. It is dangerous waters. [Source]

Why would someone throw themselves to the wolves and risk having your reputation tarnished?

  • Blogging provides a creative outlet for writing, research, technology, presentation, marketing, and social networking.
  • Regular publishing improves vocabulary and grammar.
  • Blogging provides history.
  • A personal blog allows for trial and error with lessor used html tags, css designs, and web technologies, growing the programmer’s toolset and professionalism.
  • Blogging provides an opportunity to give to others [through mentorship].
  • Community develops around a blog.
  • Friendships develop between people that may never see each other. Business relationships can form. Support networks can form.
  • Blogging can even be therapeutic!
  • Blogs can be totally fictitious.
  • Blogging is exhibitionism with a sprinkle of ego boosting.
  • Blogging has become an outlet … to share … adventures!

Those are some of my reasons. Blogging has its nerve racking side with people getting the wrong impression of the blogger. Online provides a false sense of anonymity which allows us to put on or take off a mask much the way a car allows someone the same false sense of anonymity which manifests itself in road rage. We see a driver give the finger to another driver, blow their horn in anger, or cut them off because the cars take away the human element; all the driver sees is a car. However, those around us see a white van with a big number 53 on the hood and wonder "why is Doug being so rude?" Can one blog post change your reputation with the people in your life (online or real life)?

When people from the online world meet for the first time, the experience is unnerving, fascinating, and enlightening for these online people have shared stories and know of each other intimately but are always surprised to find that often the person they “know” online is not the same as the person in real life … and in real life the person may have much more depth, be less revealing, and more politically correct. [Source]

The reverse is also true. When someone in the real world discovers your blog, you risk having their impression of you changed. I often cringe when someone says "I found your website."

So who is Scoble and why is he an idiot? Scoble is not unlike me. He’s a technoevanglist. I used to think he was over-hyped because of his job at Microsoft and just happened to be one of the lucky bloggers that got noticed. Then I actually started reading his work and watching his Twitters (and his link dumps) and to be frank, he has earned his notoriety! And his notoriety has been self perpetuating as it has taken him into tech shows and earned him first looks at cool technologies. Ok. Maybe Scoble is very unlike me. Perhaps I wish I could be more like Scoble! Why is Scoble an idiot? Oh! Because he published something raw and got the ire of many people. (He’s not really an idiot.)

It’s interesting that Wired chose to link to this and jump on the "Scoble is an idiot" pile. [Source]

It is easy to criticize someone particularly when that person throws themselves in the public’s eye. The more people looking, the more likely someone will give a negative review. As we produce a large volume of work, the odds that the publisher is going to put out something bad increases. Perhaps we should be a little less critical!

Update: Dennis Howlett understood Scoble’s message.
Scoble Doesn’t Deserve the Scorn He’s Getting (I understood his message)

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What’s the right way to attribute a source?

I am loving this discussion. Bloggers, programmers, and geeks need to jump over and join in the fun!

Update: I wonder how many people are linking to Michael’s post. Jail Lail has linked to it. He even twittered it. Music City Bloggers have it covered. Has the NYT actually linked to it yet? If so, how did they attribute their story?
See also: Technorati and be sure to digg it.

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Blogfest and Blogathon

Devil of a wife

Tonight is a Blogfest! We will be there. Rich, one of our Blogathon partners is already at Bailey’s on his shift.

Bailey’s holds a special place for Cathy and I because that was where we had our first date. We met for all of 2 minutes at a Halloween party being thrown at my house then 4 months later we were behaving like nervous school kids on a first date over a pool table at Bailey’s. I rapid fired every joke, with increasing naughtiness, I knew to cover my nervousness. Cathy flirted and wow’d me seducing me with her beauty and wit then upping the ante on my innuendos until everyone in the bar had quit playing pool to watch us being suggestive with pool cues, lessons, and across the table exposures. We had a blast! And our friends who got us together to commiserate our similar situations, hoping that we would take some frustrations out on each other and move on, just sat back and enjoyed the show as two grown adults fumbled around trying to remember how to date.

I almost blew our relationship. I was so overcome by Cathy that I really did not want to screw things up by coming on to hard. So in the parking lot I tried to be all casual and attempted to say, "I don’t want you to feel pressured or rushed into a relationship" but the words came out something like "if you want to get together and have sex without a commitment, I’m your man!" Oh yeah! Smoooooth.

Heading to Bailey’s! Oh! You can still sponsor us! Pleeaasse! Read more here.

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You don’t get what you don’t ask for

I have seen a lot of content theft from Reality Me. Yes, I publish full RSS feeds because I like to read full RSS feeds and you get what you give. But that makes it easier for robotic blogs to steal the content and present it as their own. The only way I know about the theft is that I allow trackbacks in my comments. Fortunately, many of my posts link to other information on Reality Me so when someone steals my content I instantly know. That also puts me in a quandary. Technically, these sites are helping my page rank and validating my blog by giving links back to me. On the other hand, they are diminishing the quality of the content (as viewed by the search engines) since the content of the post is duplicated in its entirety. So, do I ignore the theft valuing my time and the links to my blog more than the theft of my hard work? (see comments 6, 7 and 8 on this post that I composed over the course of a week) Or do I waste valuable time tracking down the owner of the blog and pursing legal recourses to stop the infringement?

When I noticed that another post was stolen on June 30, I decided to follow Lorelle VanFossen’s advice and contact the thief. I posted the following as a comment on the other blog:

This is to advise you that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website/blog. Your illegal use of XXXX article at XXXURLXXX is originally from my website/blog called XXTITLEXXX at XXXURLXXX. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder. Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under copyright laws.

Please take one or more of the following actions immediately:

* Re-write the post to include excerpts with a link to the original content.
* Credit the material specifically to me, as author, and my website [be specific].
* Provide compensation for use of my copyright protected material of $XX.00 USD paid via [payment method].
* Remove the plagiarized material immediately.

I expect a response within 5 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter.
[Source]

Naturally I filled in all the Xs appropriately. Surprisingly it took less time to do that than it is taking to write this post. And in just about as much time, the theft had turned to honorable blogger by changing the post to a summary and giving an appropriate attribution. I was pleasantly surprised and no longer harbored ill feelings toward the other person. I even followed up with a thank you comment. I feel we both win this way.

Lorelle VanFossen has more fantastic insight into the problem of content theft explaining image theft, feed scraping, and website hijacking. She also explains what to do when you become a victim of content theft.

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Drupal – Not bad

I just finished a Drupal theming project. I rode a steep learning curve but I can dig Drupal now. Styling with css. Custom PHP. Custom nodes and blocks. Pretty cool! I do not think Drupal will steal me away from WordPress for blogging but it may steer me toward using it as a CMS platform for business website applications for businesses that want to have regular updates (ala blogging) and more interaction with their customers (ala forums).