Has Your Content Been Stolen?

Has your content been stolen? This can happen to any honest blogger who is always writing posts by himself. Someone might simply take advantage out of it and steal whatever posts he likes. There are at least a few different ways you can react in such situation:

1. Remain silent and do not do anything while telling yourself that you do not care about it. Sometimes if is not worth to do anything about it.
2. Contact the scraper by email and ask him to remove the stolen content from his blog. The problem is that he might not listen to you. Sometimes it might be even hard to find a way to contact him.
3. Use a Wordpress plug-in (such as RSS footer from joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/rss-footer/) that will automatically link back to your site from the website of a scraper where he published your post. This plug-in might be very useful if you want to stay informed about any attempts of stealing your content. Of course, simply knowing about your content being published somewhere will not remove it.

Overall, there are not many things you can do if your content is being stolen by some unknown website. On the other hand, webmasters of popular websites may be afraid that you might spread the news of what they did.

March 1st, 2010 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Technology, Websites | | 7 Comments

Blog Directories

Recently, I have been involved in submitting my blog to different directories in order boost the popularity of my blog. Here is the list of directories that you might consider submitting your blog to:

-Blog Flux is weblog directory plus a button maker, Google PageRank checker, and a pinging service.
-BlogStreet features blog profiles, RSS ecosystem, blog “tops”, search and directory.
-Globe of Blogs is an index of weblogs as submitted by their authors.
-LS Blogs is a directory of blogging-related sites: forums, directories and search engines, software and hosts, and blogs.
-Technorati is perhaps the most popular directory. You can submit your photo as well.
-Findory aggregates blogs and recommends content based on users interest. It means that if a user is reading a blog with similar content he may be presented with your blog.
-Blogarama is another popular directory.
-2rss.com is where you can submit your RSS feed.
-Blogdigger is an RSS search engine. Submit your feed here.
-Bloghop allows users to tagsurf blogs that match their interest.

Keep in mind that in most cases editors of those directories will want to review your website before accepting it. Make sure your blog is at least a few weeks/months old and has some original content.

February 11th, 2010 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 50 Comments

Blogoholics

Do you ever wonder how many people are blogoholics? Quite often I notice bloggers who are blogging a lot. That is probably due to the fact that they want to increase various rankings like Page Rank and Alexa. Many of them are doing some marketing and focusing on attracting visitors. I think that very few things can be as addictive as blogging. By blogging I not only mean writing and publishing posts, but also staying in touch with other writers and contributing to their blogs. If you give out your personal details to a lot of people on the Internet, then you may be interested in the new LifeLock Command Center.
It might be a good idea to set hours at which you should work on your blog so that you will not be tempted to work throughout the whole day. I wonder how many bloggers would be able to admit that they are blogoholics, and how many blogoholics there actually are out there.

January 11th, 2010 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 78 Comments

Hosting a Blog on Your Own Domain

This time I would like to write about advantages and disadvantages of blogs hosted on your own domain name:

-You will have to pay for the domain name and for hosting your domain. This can amount to approximately $150 per year, but it varies depending on which hosting plan you will choose.
-If your blog is hosted on Blogspot you can incorporate AdSense, but Google will take part of the profit. However, you will not need to share your profit with Google if you decide to have your own domain.
-Other bloggers might show more respect towards bloggers who have their blog hosted on their own domain. That is because they might assume that such a blogger is more serious about blogging.
-If you have your own domain, you have a lot higher possibility to fully customize your blog. However, it might require some html and php knowledge. Make sure you learn some basic html before you decide to host your own blog.

I will leave you to make your own conclusions about hosting, because it really depends on circumstances. Overall, if you are really serious about blogging you may eventually decide to host your blog on your own domain.

January 7th, 2010 - Posted in About Blogging, About Internet, Websites | | 18 Comments

New Search Engines

Choosing a search engine is a very important choice. Many Internet users use search engines on a daily basis. While most Internet users are probably using Google as their default search engine, it does not mean that there is no competition. I am not even talking about Yahoo or Microsoft’s search engines, but about relatively new ones that might become popular in the upcoming years. One of them is Cuil (pronounced Cool) and so far it looks very promising. Naturally, being cool is not its only attribute, and Cuil boasts over 120 billion indexed webpages. Some even claim that this is more than Google has indexed, however, it is hard to say whether it is true or not. In any case, the more competition there is, the better it is for users, as more competition usually means higher quality. This is especially true when it comes to the technology market, as often we do not see a lot of competition. Why is that, one might ask? I believe that is because the resources required to compete with other companies in technology market are huge. It is relatively easy to open a grocery store; however, creating a search engine from scratch which is suppose to compete with giants like Google is not easy. I hope this will change when technology will become even more widespread. Personally, I would like to see at least a few high quality search engines being created within the next few years.

November 22nd, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 2 Comments

Gossip on the Internet

These days everybody can be a writer, publisher, or an author. That is true because anyone can create a blog or a website. Most of the websites in the world might not be that high quality, as a lot of them do not contain any original content. The qualifications of webmasters may also vary. After all, not everybody graduated from English studies or has Ph.D. in linguistics. The Internet is a place where many people speak out their minds and share their opinions. It is also a place, where a lot of gossip starts about celebrities, the world of politics, or even our everyday life. I was wondering recently how a person can distinguish between real facts and gossip. Fortunately, there are some ways to do so. On the Internet, there are sites that aim is to stop gossip and fight with scams. Sites like truthorfiction.com and factcheck.org are a good example. When in doubt whether a site you are visiting is reliable, check them out. Those sites can also benefit you in other ways besides letting you know about gossips. Very often, gossips are not that harmful, but spyware and malware can be very harmful. If you visit truthorfiction.com, you will see that this website can help you avoid problems related to scams and viruses which you can get from your email box. You might get infected very easily by opening an email which you should not trust in the first place. You need to be aware that there are many people who are sending phony emails in order to infect your computer with malicious software. Many of them use popular scams in order to achieve it, so it is important to know how to recognize them. How about you? How do you protect yourself?

October 28th, 2009 - Posted in Technology, Websites | | 4 Comments

Autosurf Scams

Autosurfs are traffic exchanges that rotate websites in Internet browsers in an automated or manual way. First of all, I want to make clear that in this post I am talking about autosurfs that promise money for autosurfing, not autosurfs that are for traffic exchange purposes. Unfortunately, Autosurfs in such case are a type of a pyramid scheme. They are often called investment autosurfs. Investment autosurf is an inaccurate name in my opinion, as they have really nothing to do with investments, but rather with gambling. This whole concept is not only weak in my opinion, but it is also against PayPal’s use policy, and PayPal has already blocked almost all accounts of autosurf programs. Avoid such programs, unless you want to get involved with them for a while without spending any money to see how this concept works, just out of curiosity. Just remember my warning when you will want to deposit any money. The problem with them is that only a small group of people who joined such programs in their early stages have a potential to earn any money. This is how pyramid schemes work, and this is exactly what investment autosurfs are. They are simply scams, and people behind them want to get money from you, and unfortunately very often succeed. I am always suspicious of companies that wants you to deposit money before they pay you anything. The chances are very high that you will not get your money back at all, so watch out.

October 13th, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Business Topics, Websites | | 36 Comments

Check Your Search Engine Ranking

A good webmaster is going to know a lot about his website. Having access to information is necessary to deal with any potential problems or to compete with competition. There are many tools which can be used to obtain different kinds of information, but the one which I want to talk about this time is Rank Checker. This tool is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to check your search engine rankings. Search engine ranking are very important, because a lot of traffic is usually coming from Google or other major search engines. With Rank checker you will be able to check your rankings for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If this sounds interesting to you, you can download it here: tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/.

October 5th, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 7 Comments

Censoring Cyberspace

What is great about cyberspace is that people can freely express their opinions. It is a place where you do not have to be a famous politician or a millionaire to be able to influence masses. If your arguments are sound, you are going to have a big influence on the public. Unfortunately, there are some politicians in various governments that would like to censor cyberspace. They would like to do it, because they fear the truth and are unable to deal with it. As a blogger myself, I greatly value the freedom to express myself. I wish everyone that they will be able to do the same in their country. We can just hope that more and more countries will have greater freedoms.

September 18th, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 3 Comments

Movies and Your PC

Most people still do not know that their PCs can easily replace their TVs. Many people think that the Internet is mainly for browsing web pages. Since people like watching movies, they tend to spend a lot of time in front on their TV. However, PCs are more and more often replacing traditional TVs. There are many videos on the Internet that are quite entertaining and are not copyrighted. If you like watching news, you will find a lot of videos for free on the net for which you will not have to pay. If you look for entertainment, you will find a lot of funny videos on YouTube. Many of those videos you would never be able to watch on your TV. There are millions of entertaining video clips and videos on the Internet, so take that into consideration.

August 28th, 2009 - Posted in About Internet, Websites | | 6 Comments