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Archives for May 2006

Techcrunch & Flipping Burgers

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BusinessLogs has a great take on the Techcrunch redesign.

A fair amount of digging and surmising comes to this:

What this says to me is that Michael gave her specific instructions on what he wanted it to look like (“newspaper-ish” comes to mind as a common client request), and although Rachel had her thoughts and ideas about what a new TechCrunch should look like, they were pre-empted by what Mike gave her as an instruction set. This happens a lot in client work, which I’m sure Rachel knows very well, and that’s the idea that no matter what vision you have in your head for a client’s site, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match their vision for the site.

To me, this is all to painful a memory. Designers are often treated like their skills are akin to flipping burgers at the local fast food chain. Why even hire a designer if you’re just going to dictate what you want them to do?

Most kids can build an html template, it’s easy. The skills you hire a designer for should be anything but the basic ability to piece html together.

Having said all that, I think he did a fairly good job on the ads, though some would clearly disagree.

Arrington could put 5 more ads on the site and I doubt he would notice a dropoff in traffic. The redesign would have to be a black background with black text before people finally gave up. You wonder why gas prices continue to go up? Probably becasue we keep on buying it no matter what.

A final thought from me: I HATE centered, fixed width designs. They suck to absolute high heaven and i always feel shortchanged by them. I would have expected better from such a site, and bearing in mind that Arrington appears to have designed this site and gotten some casual labour to implement it, I’d really of thought he’d have had a better grip on how to do such things.

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Getting People to Comment on Your New Blog

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How many of you have purposefully arrived a little late to a party to avoid the awkwardness of being the only one there, apart from the host(s)? How many online forums have you arrived at from search engines where the only topics are those by the forum owner, so you’ve refrained from posting a response? Probably a few. Now, how many of you might have got involved with some of those forums if there had been evidence of a bigger community? Again, I’m going to assume quite a few of you.

The same mentality applies to new blogs. We all tend to want to be heard by as many others as possible, so why would we comment on a blog with no other participants?

This leaves the owner of a new blog with a conundrum. How do you get people to comment on your site if they won’t do so until someone else does?

There are a few options you can try, although none are exactly perfect.

  1. Comment yourself. This is the easiest option, but unless you’re adding something significant extra to your original entry you’ll look like you’re talking to yourself.
  2. Pretend to be someone else. Pretty much the same as option one, but a little further along on the ‘sad-o-meter’.
  3. Invite people to comment. Whether it’s inviting other bloggers in your niche, or just getting your mates to comment, sending an email invitation out can be one of the most effective ways to get a conversation going. A note on your friends – make sure they’re going to have something to add to the conversation. If something looks like a clique others will be put off.
  4. Write Better Content. If you’re still not pulling anyone in, could it be your content just isn’t good enough to provoke discussion? Take a look back over everything you’ve written. Look for places it could be improved, and bear your findings in mind when you write your next entry. This will take the most time to achieve results, but is far and away the best for long-term results.
  5. Provoke Controversy. Good old controversy. A time-honoured way to get people talking. Just remember to prepare for negative responses to whatever you write. Also referred to as “link-baiting”, controversial posts carry a risk of ruining any good reputation you might hope to achieve. My preference would be to avoid using controversy unless absolutely needed.

This list is far from exhaustive and are mostly just off the top of my head. What methods have you used for kicking off the conversations on your new blogs?

Launching A Blog

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I’ve been experimenting with two different approaches to launching a new blog recently: just going live with it, and in contrast, build it up quietly, then launch.

It’s been interesting comparing the two methods and how they’ve affected my attitude towards the blog itself.

Doing it Quietly

Go! Chris! Go! is my new personal blog. Or at least it will be when I finally “push the button”  and put it live. I’ve been quietly building it behind a password-protected curtain, writing content, tweaking design details and functionality… Doing the things we often hear recommended to us.

On the whole, I’ve found the process rather uninspiring. When you’re behind a veil where no one can see you there is less motivation to push yourself. Maybe I’m just finding this on this site because it’s a personal blog, but I’m sure I’ve felt this way on any site I’ve worked on. As such, I’m not making much (if any) process on the site and it’s close to being stillborn.

Until you’re in the public firing-line, when the praise and criticism are flying, you’ll never know if you’re going in the right direction or not. Ultimately, if you’re putting anything on the internet – this most public of public forums – it’s because you want other people to see it.

Just Do It!

By contrast, The Get Rich Project(GRP) was done in the most direct manner: a wordpress install, apply the Hemingway theme and write like there’s no tomorrow…

And write I have! In the last week I’ve managed more posts on the GRP than I have in a month on most of my other blogs. There is a lot more energy behind this blog than any I’ve worked on before and it’s proving to be great fun! Even for such a (usually) dry subject as personal finances.

An extension of this type of site launch is the so-called “live” redesign – where a website is redesigned in “real time” while people are still able to visit. I’ve done a couple of this type of redesign and in each case they’ve proven to be fun, enjoyable experiences.

When launching in this way, I made sure I had written a few decent posts before I started doing any of the usual “marketing” – del.icio.us, forums, etc. This way I should hopefully avoid the “empty shell” effect normally associated with launching in this fashion.

Not everything will be optimised off-the-bat, but I’d argue that no blog is optimised on launch – no matter how much planning you put into it. You just never know how people will react until it is in the wild. You can apply your own (and others) past experience as much as you want, but each blog is unique so you’ll never know for sure.

Give it a Go

Next time you have a blog to launch, consider trying the “just launch it” method. With maybe a little prior planning, starting-up this way can prove to be an effective way of igniting that extra little spark of passion that reminds you blogging is still as much about fun and “doing things different” as it is about business and making money.

I’m hoping to repeat the personal feeling of success I now have at the end of this first week of the GRP with two other blogs I now have in the pipeline.

Three Free Tools I Use To Track My Conversations Online

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In February, Chris Garrett wrote about tracking your conversations. I use three excellent tools to help me do this.

1. coComment – I leave an average of fifteen or twenty comments a day on different blogs using coComment (see my coComment page). I have the new coComment Firefox extension, which is far better than the old Greasemonkey script and bookmarklet method. Whenever a fellow coComment user comments at the same URL as I have, the extension alerts me within five minutes.

coComment has made me more productive and able to track my conversations. I’m a coCo-nut. coComment lets me tag the comments I make for future reference, and helps me find people who make similar comments to mine or who frequently visit the same blogs I do.

2. del.icio.us – If coComment doesn’t work at a URL where I make a comment, I simply submit the comment and tag the page as “mycomments” in my del.icio.us account. The del.icio.us Firefox extension makes this easy to do (it takes maybe five or ten seconds).

3. co.mments – I’ve just started using this service. It looks like it may replace my del.icio.us tagging method, because in addition to remembering where I make comments, it tracks those pages for ANY new comments. Unfortunately, co.mments doesn’t yet allow me to connect with other commenters like coComment does – and I don’t know if co.mments even lets me publicly display the conversations I’m tracking.

I use these three tools to remember where I’ve commented and what I’ve said, and to follow the continuing conversations. Right now, I still go and visit the pages I’ve recently commented at, just to be sure. But these tools and others are constantly improving. Hopefully a tool will come along that will automate the process so I don’t have to remember to follow up on comments I’ve left – the tool would simply alert me. I’m an editor for the Know More Media blog network and I just wish there were an easy way to track all the comments our 50-plus authors leave around the Web!

What methods do you use to track your comments? Do you like any or all of the methods above? Please let us all know.

The Mystery of Anonymous Comments

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Has anyone got a theory for why so many visitors to blogs feel the urge to tell you all the ways in which you are wrong, dumb, suck etc, but don’t feel enough conviction to have their name associated with their opinions?

It seems strange to me that someone would want to give another the benefit of their wisdom but not take credit for it. If I was the creator of such enlightened and pithy commentary as “you suck, leave the ‘sphere asswad” I am sure I would not only want full credit but to have it registered in case of plagiarism.

Of course not all comments are as intelligently crafted as that example. Some even are posted in quite agreeable language with only a minimum of cussing. Even so many people do not want to use their own names. It’s almost like they want you to know how they feel but do not really care for your reply.

I can understand someone posting anonymously if there is a chance their comments could get them into some sort of trouble, but otherwise …

Do you ever post anonymously and if so, why?

Protecting Your Copyrights Online – An Interview With Jonathan Bailey

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Recently, Mary Nicklin posted a forum topic about copycats who had stolen her blog content. She asked what could be done about it. Jonathan Bailey, who runs Plagiarism Today (PT), was just the subject of an article in the Boston Globe (found via Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog, where Jonathan was also mentioned). On one of my blogs a few weeks ago, I wrote a post mentioning that cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson once said in one of his novels, written in the mid-1990s, that copyright violations would run rampant on the Internet and that there was probably nothing that could be done about it. Jonathan commented that he had several successes (over 95%), so I thought I’d conduct an (email) interview with him. My questions are italicized and bolded below, and his answers are block-quoted.


(1) For the record, what do you consider your profession to be?

My profession is in transition. I am working hard to make plagiarism fighting my full time job. I’ve taken some first steps to starting up a non-profit organization and consulting services. However, since those things are probably months away from paying the bills, I do a wide variety of temp work and odd jobs, most of them IT related.

All of this is counter to my education background though, which is that of a journalism and mass communications student that is well rounded in print journalism, advertising and, to a lesser degree, public relations.

(2) How long has your Plagiarism Today website/ weblog been running?

I’ve been running PT since June 2005. However, the first month I blogged in private, without a domain or any public presence, so that I could make sure that I was passionate enough about this to continue working on it for a long time to come.

I didn’t want to be one of those bloggers that jumps into it and quits after two weeks.

(3) Do you run it full-time, or as a supplement to work you do offline?

Like I said, I am working hard to make it my full time job. Right now I supplement my income some with a regular job but only work a few days per week. Most days, PT is my full time job.

(4) When was the first time you were plagiarised? Was it before your website existed? How did you find your lifted article? What did you do about it? Did you succeed?

I run another site, ravensrants.com. It’s my personal literature site and will be celebrating its tenth year online this November.

It was work on that site that was first stolen. It happened about four years ago. I was in an AIM chat with the readers of the site, something I could easily do then, and a reader asked me if I ran another site. I told him no, that Raven’s Rants was my only one and he informed me, very bewildered, that he had seen most of my content on another site.

He provided the link for me after some digging and, sure enough, nearly all of the content of my site, nearly six years worth of work, was posted and placed under another name, more specifically “Crimson” and he was using his own domain to do it.

I was somewhat fortunate at this point. I had studied copyright somewhat and knew, if nothing else, that my work was protected and that I had rights. I also survived mass media law and ethics class and knew that what he was doing was actionable in court.

Still, none of that prevented me from having the worst knee-jerk reaction in history. After politely signing off from the chat, I flew into rage the likes of which I have never seen. I frightened my significant other I was so angry.

After calming down enough to type I emailed my plagiarist a very poorly worded cease and desist letter. It wasn’t obscenity-laden but definitely unprofessional in every way.

It turned out that my plagiarist was really a 15-year-old punk who didn’t have the courage to face me. He forwarded my email on to his older cousin, whom had given him the domain and the hosting as a gift. The cousin contacted me and, since I was now calm enough to be rational, the two of us worked out a solution.

The site went down in pretty short order and that matter was resolved.

However, it got Crystal, my significant other, and I thinking about the issue of plagiarism and an eerie question loomed afterward. If one person could steal so much so easily? How many others have done the
same.

We hastily developed the search techniques I now describe on PT and got the answer: hundreds. Every poem, nearly 100 of them at that time, had at least two plagiarized copies out there.

That began the second phase of the war, the one that continues today.

(5) What are some of the techniques you employ to find copycats? For example, do you use some unique combination of words in your articles?

I’ve been very fortunate that my works are textual (IE: poems, rants, short stories, etc.). Searching for my work has generally been a simple matter of punching in a unique phrase into Google with quote marks and seeing what comes up.

Even more fortunate is the Google Alerts tool, which completely automates the whole process of searching for my own content. Without Google Alerts, I’d doubt I’d have the time to protect all of my items.

(6) What are some of the techniques you use to get them to remove lifted content? Which is your most effective?

Generally, when I discover plagiarism, I try to be gentlemanly about it and write the plagiarist directly. I have a stock cease and desist letter that I send and only need to change out a few unique variables for each case.

If that fails, or the plagiarist can not be contacted through a reliable means, I simply contact the host of the site. If the host is American, which most are, I use a DMCA notice, which I also have a stock version of. Foreign hosts get a different notice which is much less formal and worded as if it were a more general abuse complaint.

If that fails, which it rarely does, I can use DMCA notices to remove sites from the major search engines and/or have their domain pulled if applicable. I am yet to every rely on those techniques, but know that they are there if needed.

As far as what method is most effective, definitely contacting hosts has a better outcome. Hosts remove work, generally, well over 90% of the time. Plagiarists generally only act 50% [or] less. If I didn’t feel it important to fire a warning shot, I would probably go straight to the host.

(7) What is your success rate?

My success rate is well over 95%. The cases that aren’t resolved are generally more trouble than they are worth affairs. I’ve never completely run out of options, not in the past few years. I’ve just opted to let them go as, at the time, more serious matters demanded my attention. With cases that have been serious and warrant bringing all arms to bear, the rate is pretty much 100%.


(8) Have you ever had to deal with repeat offenders? If so, how?

Several. Crimson himself was a repeat offender. Three months after being shut down he started up the exact same site at the exact same place with the exact same work. It was trivial to shut him down the second time, but still very annoying as I was already knee-deep in other plagiarism matters.

I have had a few others spring up on different sites. An example might be seeing a Myspace plagiarist simply pack up an move to Xanga.

I’ve also had several people that I suspect are repeat offenders (similar profiles, similar works taken, similar tastes, etc.) but have not been able to prove it as they use different information and different names.

Generally though, repeat offenders are rare. When someone gets shut down like that, it is unlikely that they will steal from the same sources again. They usually either go away for good or simply move on to another target.

(9) Have you ever had to threaten a lawsuit? Did you go ahead with it?

Had to? No. Threatening a lawsuit, beyond the general threats in a regular cease and desist letter, has never been needed. One plagiarist did push me too far though and nearly was sued.

When I moved to New Orleans three years ago, she positioned herself as a good friend of mine. She was from Picayune, Mississippi, which is less than two hours away, and knew the New Orleans literature scene well. She was going to help me establish myself here as a writer.

That never really happened but we did chat regularly and became pretty close friends, at least in the online sense of the word. One day though, during a regular plagiarism sweep, I discovered that she had been secretly plagiarizing my work and entering it into contests, often with great success.

To add insult to injury, she had even lifted pieces that I had helped her find on my site (she was looking in the wrong section).

For the first time ever, I gathered evidence and instructed my lawyer to sue. She was close enough to strike, the infringement, over thirty items, was enough warrant filing suit over and she had really struck a nerve.

She was saved by Hurricane Katrina. We were going to file the papers a week or two after the storm hit and, after we came back, the matter seemed unimportant. We would have filed sooner but I was waiting for paperwork from the copyright office.

That’s the only time that push ever really came to shove. To this day she swears that she isn’t the plagiarist. that she has no idea who this person was using her name, posting her personal information and promoting her band while stealing my literature was.

Sadly for her, I’d heard that story from at least a dozen plagiarists before.

(10) How do you feel about full-text RSS/ Atom web feeds?

While there’s little doubt that full feeds make one’s content more vulnerable, there’s three elements that need to be considered.

First, even if your site has a serious problem with splogging, most of your subscribers are not thieves. Even I, with such a huge plagiarism problem, enjoy a readership that is still 99.9% honest.

It seems unfair to punish the many to hinder the few.

Second, the technology to scrape content from a Web page is here and has been here for at least ten years. Software is already out there (I won’t mention the name) that is designed to scrape content from any templated site, blog or not. They even offer a tutorial for scraping the IMDB.

It’s only a matter of time before the feed itself is almost irrelevant to scraping. The permalink will likely be the key.

Finally, Feedburner, feed footers and, soon, plagiarism detection services can do a great job protecting a feed, full [or] truncated. Tracking down scrapers is getting easier by the day, it’s other kinds of plagiarism that are getting harder to stop.

So while there are many good arguments for using truncated feeds, content theft isn’t one of them. I keep my feeds full and use Feedburner to monitor them.

Works well enough but, then again, I’m somewhat shielded by my subject matter.

(11) How do you feel about the Creative Commons license?

I’ve been a fan of the CC organization since almost day one. I remember proudly displaying my 1.0 CC license a mere month after the organization launched. I’ve since kept up with the license changes and released everything I have ever written on the Web under one of their licenses.

I don’t know for certain if a CC license reduces plagiarism or not, but I do know that having a solid copyright policy is a good deterrent and, it seems logical enough, that giving people the opportunity to legitimately reuse a work reduces the illegitimate uses.

Regardless, it isn’t about reducing plagiarism so much as allowing fair sharing of a work. It is worth noting though that all CC licenses, these days, require attribution and that the option to no require attribution was removed after the 1.0 license versions because it was so unpopular (97% opted to require it).

Clearly, both the CC organization and the majority of CC users are against plagiarism of their content, otherwise, they’d probably opt for another license or simply dedicate the work to the public domain.

(12) Do you write any other blogs?

I do still work on ravensrants.com, though I’ve taken something of a hiatus in recent months as PT has taken off. Beyond that though, I don’t post anywhere else regularly.

To date, I haven’t done any guest blogging, or article writing, though I might be working on copy for a new startup soon, and I haven’t been invited on a podcast.

Still, these are all things that I’m hoping to do as I love branching out and trying new things.

Thanks to Jonathan for the valuable information about protecting copyrights. If you want to learn more about fighting plagiarism, visit his site or subscribe to his web feed. You can also study the “Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works”. (There are many sources; one is here, and in PDF form.)

I first encountered the Berne Convention when I was researching copyright laws and issues around the time I first started publishing my now defunct print magazine. While there’s more to this Convention than I realized (and it never took place in 1972, despite what I’ve been saying for years), probably one of the more important points is that the copyright rules set forth were supposedly adopted by every country that is a member of the UN (United Nations). If you are a citizen of a UN country, and if Jonathan’s handy advice does not suffice for you in getting copycats to stop, you have legitimate legal recourse.

Have you been plagiarised or outright copycatted? Have you done anything about it? If so, what?

Right Way, Wrong Way, Your Way

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You know what they say, opinions are like noses, everybody has one. (Although there are other, more vulgar versions of that phrase that obviously I would never repeat, *cough*). When you are starting out with something with as many variables as blogging, all these opinions on what is right and wrong, what works and what doesn’t, good and bad, well it can get a bit confusing. We are probably as guilty as any of adding to this confusion, although I hope we are a help most of the time.

Thing is with blogging there isn’t any right or wrong path. There is always another way to do this right. Blogging is an art rather than a science and it depends almost as much on individual personality as it does technique. So rather than there being a “right way” there is only “your way”.

So what am I saying, why am I telling you this?

OK, it might not be a whole bunch of help me saying that you should do things your own way. Especially if you are only just starting out. But that is precisely what you should do. How you find out what “your way” turns out to be is the important bit.

A lot of the advice I read from bloggers could lead someone to think “I need to focus on this” or “that tactic worked for so and so, it must be the way forward”. I’m not saying don’t read the advice and take note of it, quite the opposite. Try everything and see what works for you. Once you have tried something test the results, check back and see if it works for you. Follow your instincts for what fits you most naturally.

Or course some really great tactics will not work for you right away, some through bad luck, others through faulty implementation, others through just plain bad advice, some things will just be wrong for you. You will have to work out which it was.

Blogging is wide open for experimentation. Saying you are a “blogger” does not precisely define what it is you do any more than saying you are a writer. Are you a diarist, a technical blogger, do you blog the news or write tutorials? Is your blog product focussed or all about sarcastic wisecracks?

Here at Performancing we try to give advice based on our own experience, what has worked for us and what has not. I know Darren at Problogger does the same. We are all learning, our experience of blogging changes daily and so do the tactics we use and the approach we employ. It’s really all we can do. Be wary, the advice you read might be just speculation, rehash of others advice or dodgy recommendations in order to sell affiliate products and there is enough bad advice out there without adding to it.

Not all tactics will work for all bloggers equally and in reality it takes a combination of tactics to be truly successful. It is rare that any one thing will work in isolation. When you find something that works for you, do not ditch all your other activities. If you hear about something you are not doing, do not worry overmuch if it looks promising just see if you can incorporate it into your strategy.

So next time you see someone telling you that the only way to success is through SEO, or social bookmarking, or free article sharing sites, or forum spamming, or any of the other multitude of tactics, do try it and see if it works for you but don’t believe you have found the “one true way” either, YOUR WAY is the only way.

When is a Blog Not a Blog?

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In Chris’ post Can Anyone Make Money From Blogging?, Kim Krause, who runs the excellent Cre8asite Forums says “I don’t consider many blogs to be actual blogs. They are just web sites whose owners found free software and free templates to do their bidding.” which is pretty much spot on I think.

There seems to be an alarming, but probably not entirely surprising rise in junk blogs recently. Not spam blogs, the entirely automated type, but the ones where real people are simply cutting and pasting press releases, parts of other bloggers content and general junk just for the Adsense clicks. The funny thing, if you can find amusement in such stuff, is that these folks think that the fact that they use blogging software like WordPress, means they’re bloggers, and so naturally get a free pass to do whatever the hell they please, ‘cos as we all know, bloggers can do no wrong right?

What’s worse, is that for the most part, they DO get a free pass — We’re all still to enamoured with the whole blog thing to see the woods for the trees I think, but here’s how the landscape looks to me right now:

  • Blogging continues to cross over to mainstream. With that move comes a dillution of “blogging” as many of us think of it.
  • The “Search economy” (publishing for adsense, obsession with Search rankings) continues to drive people to producing shit content for clicks
  • Those people use blog software, call themselves bloggers
  • Real bloggers, if indeed such a beast still exists, start to get tarred with the same brush

It’s not a pretty picture, but it does mean that blogging is maturing, and even outgrowing its boundaries now. I tend to think of blogs less as “blogs” as time goes by, and more as sites with comments and trackback — as web2.0 becomes the norm. With that mainstreaming comes the darker side of the web. Funded by Google, Yahoo and a bunch of others, the Search Economy pushes people to produce crap, and this is nothing new, we’re just seeing it more in blogs these days.

I dont have a solution to this, Im not even sure it’s actually a problem (well, not a huge one..), but think its worthy of a little discussion here dont you?

So,

  • Is blogging for adsense a problem?
  • Are junk blogs a problem in your niche? (please do not post examples)
  • Is Google to blame?
  • Has blogging really gone mainstream?

Tell us what you think…..

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