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Raj Dash

Back That Thing Up: Keep A Private Article Bank

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If you are writing for a number of clients, or even just one, you’re likely to want to keep track of your work. Why not create a private article bank, in the form of a password-protected weblog?

Depending on your uses, this article bank could be on your laptop/ desktop computer’s local web server, or a hidden subdomain somewhere. I prefer the latter, so that you can give access to a client if they need a back up copy. Either form is a backup copy for you.

Having a private article bank gives you a quick way to search older posts without skewing the pageviews of your client’s website. As well, if you post to your live article bank on the same day as to your client’s website, you have a record of your work.

For example, one site I write for asks for exclusive rights for one year. I can easily check my bank for articles in a given month and see if any are about to be “freed up”. Depending on your blogging platform, it might also be easy to keep track of which articles you’ve been paid for. (WordPress, for example, allows you to add custom variables to each post. You could a “paid status” field.)

In general, an article bank will come in hand either when you have a lot of clients, or when you have long-term projects with a few clients. It’s a supplement to the article log I mentioned previously. And you can easily see what your productivity has been in a given month.

Back That Thing Up: Keep A Simple Log of All Your Posts

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Most of the time, when writing for a client, I have occasion in future posts to link back to older posts. To facilitate that, it’s a good idea to record post titles and URLs for every blog post or webpage that you write, whether for yourself or a client.

Use a simple Excel spreadsheet on your computer. In addition to a column each for post “title” and “URL”, keep a column containing either a short description of the post or keywords, for reference. It’ll help you quickly decide whether or not you want to link to it.

I don’t recommend a web-based spreadsheet such as ZohoSheet, in case you temporarily don’t have Internet access but need link info for an blog post you’re working on.

Why Are Multi-Writer Weblogs More Popular?

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In Seth Godin’s Fiddleheads post, he raises an excellent point about developing a market. In his analogy, he points out that in any marketplace, say a Farmers Market, each booth owner is thinking that they’d do better if they were the only booth of their kind in the market. This feeling is echoed, Seth says, pretty much anywhere, but “this reasoning is fallacious”.

No doubt, bloggers often feel the same way, but I think that if there are more than two blogs on a topic, that’s actually a good thing for everyone. In a similar but different situation, a blog with multiple writers is arguably going to do better than most blogs with just one writer.

There are many examples of this, including most of the Weblogs, Inc blogs. My own writing has recently started appearing on other people’s blogs by request, and on one website, I’m getting several hundred pageviews per post. In just a day or two. None of my blogs have individually received as many pageviews in a single day or two, despite writing my ass off for 11 months now – and even though I publish the same type of writing and topics on my own blogs.

Why is that? I think it’s pretty simple to answer. When there is more than one writer, there’s something for everyone. There is more fresh content daily, and variety. And when writers on one weblog inter-link to each other’s posts, it’s an invitation for their loyal readers to read the other writers. A synergy is built up. But if a weblog only has one writer, the success of it depends solely on the cult of personality that that writer can build up, regardless of what they are writing about and how often.

As much as it might sting, there aren’t many writers who can achieve this cult of personality. A FEW good examples of such types of writers – in no particular order – are Darren Rowse, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Brian Clark, Yaro Starak, Steve Pavlina, Debbie Weil, and Guy Kawasaki.

The moral, for most bloggers, is that synergy is a good thing, but it is possible to be a successful soloist. You’ll note that every one of the above writers have regularly have something of value to tell their regular readers.

Know of any other solo bloggers who you think are developing their own cult of personality with their insightful writing?

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?

What To Do When You Can’t Blog

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Ever since I put out my hat as a professional blogger last summer, I’ve been more fatigued on a regular basis than with any other career. Problogging is hard work. This no doubt also comes from poor eating and sleeping habits while I surf the net researching for future  posts. Well things came to a head when, just over a week ago, I got hit hard with flu. I was so sick that I slept from the Sunday night that I got sick to Tuesday morning. All my plans for writing blog entries and boosting my traffic were delayed more than a week. But what I found was that my break from blogging didn’t affect my traffic all that much, or so my forecasting charts seem to prove.

Now how is this possible? While my traffic is still steadily climbing, it’s low enough that any sharp spikes will be noticeable and significant. But it appears that I’ve reached a high enough level of regular daily traffic that my collection of articles can sustain itself. In fact, while my traffic during last week didn’t set any new records, it stayed close to my current watermark. What’s more, my 7-day rolling total ad clicks did fairly well, almost hitting previous highs. This was also reflected in my 7-day rolling total revenue.

Because I am an informational blogger for the most part, much of my traffic is search engine-based. I don’t yet have a lot of regular readers, mainly because I don’t spend enough time daily on a single blog to cultivate regulars. Eventually, I’ll need to do something about this, because repeat visitors are a primary source of high daily traffic, and thus advertising income. The key will be to focus on a small handful of blogs, then write for them daily/ regularly, instead of spreading my efforts all over the place and only posting new content weekly on any given blog.

But in the interim, I’ve managed to build up traffic with a small collection of several hundred informational posts covering several topics.  It’s hard work, but it can be done. Had I stuck with a single topic, I’d probably not have achieved current traffic levels – some of my topics are obscure. I’ve managed to stay diversified, however.

It means a lot more work and a lot of research to write clearly about several topics instead of just one. This diversification is probably a longer-term way to becoming a successful blogger. But traffic growth is organic and thus likely more stable. Income growth is slow but steady. This just means that you can take some time off without seriously affecting your current levels of traffic or income.

I’m interested in knowing what contingency plans other bloggers have in place. Do you still blog daily? Or have you realized that blogging, like any career, requires you to take some time for yourself? Maybe you’re a machine, and you can blog daily without fail. What do you plan to do when you get sick? Do you see blogging as only a short-term venture, something you’ll stop doing after a few years? Or do you think of it as a long-term career?

If you’re wondering whether blogging is worth the effort, I might be able to help. I can’t always tell you if your topic is lucrative. However, as I’ll discuss in a later post here soon, you can use a few simple mathematical formulas and some graphs to forecast your blog traffic and income, both short-term and long-term. Once you see the forecasts, it’s easier to tell yourself that you’re achieving some successes, however small.

Productivity: Changing Your Writing Perspective

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Writers have often been given the advice  that if they’re running into writer’s block, that they should change their perspective. This can mean any one of a number of things:

  1. If you’re reading the newspaper trying to get ideas, watch TV or turn on the radio.
  2. If you’re in the study room, go to another room, or even take a walk outside. If you’re outside, go to the library.
  3. If you’re typing on the computer, pull out a pencil and notepad.

You get the idea. Another option that has worked well for me in the past, especially when I’m trying to capture my natural voice, is voice recording. This is great for some types of blogs, and it’s often easier to capture ideas on a voice recorder.

In fact, most of this entry was done on my PalmOne Treo 650, through a combination of voice recording and some cryptic notetaking. The rough edtion was punched into the native mini-keyboard. To save time, I left out most of the vowels. Here’s an example of what I typed in, errors and all:

this works very well for me. One example of this tchnq is to chg rms. Or turn on the tv, or rdo dpndng on wht yr dng rt nw. Or if yr wrtng on paper, start typng. Or recording yr vce. As I’m wrtng ths, I’m at my fve chnse bfft. I didn’t wnt to lse the idea, so I plld out my treo.

You can probably decipher most of it, but basically I’m saying that I was at my fave Chinese buffet and got the idea for this post, and a couple of others. So as not to bother other diners, I didn’t do any recording until I was outside. The redundancy of text and voice helps me when I’m procrastinating later on in the day: two reminders that I must finish the blog entry.

Any voice recorder will do, provided that you have an easy way to replay your recordings over and over while transcribing. When I ran my print magazine, I always had several mini-dictation type recorders on hand for my interviewers. I also kept 2 in my car so that while I was out doing distribution or ad sales, or even just driving (not recommended), I wouldn’t lose a great idea.

While I still have a box of recorders, I’m much preferring using Ryan Rife’s free SoundRec program on my Treo 650. While spare on features, it turns my Treo into a reasonable sound recorder, which, surprisingly, is not a native function. In fact, when I read the PalmOne site’s specs for the Treo 650, I saw no mention of being able to easily record voice memos despite the device having a microphone. SoundRec makes it simple. Although, to my disappointment, the Treo doesn’t have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to warrant using the recordings for podcasts. (For that, I use my low-hum desktop computer with a microphone and the OpenSource Audacity recording software.)

Still, this recording technique, along with a bit of text, helps me jog my memory later, when I actually sit down to post the final version of the blog entry. Overall, I get writing done than when I work without it.

Technorati Tags: writing, blog content, productivity, writing techniques

What’s More Valuable – A Comment Or A Trackback?

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Steve Pavlina’s blog is the first one I’ve ever encountered that only allows trackback links. Steve has said that because of the volume of monthly traffic that he enjoys, it’s quite a task to manage the comments that he would typically get for his incredibly popular and valuable personal development site. He also indicated that it’s rather draining to moderate large volumes of comments. Instead, he has turned off comments and turned on trackbacks.

Trackbacks are mystery to many bloggers, but their value will grow on you. In fact, it took me about 3 weeks since reading about Steve’s use of them to truly understand their full value. Now this is only my own interpretation, but here’s a brief explanation and a list of positive reasons for using trackbacks on your blog:

  1. Say that you write a blog entry that references one of my entries. If I have trackbacks turned on, an excerpt of your post will appear in my entry as a trackback comment. The text that appears typically starts and ends with an ellipsis (…). The actual excerpt text both surrounds and includes the anchor text with which you linked to my entry. The exact specifics of trackbacks vary from one blog platform to another, but with WordPress at least, I’ve found them to be on automatically.
  2. While getting comments is an important aspect of building a successful blog, there is also the problem of getting unwanted comment spam. On one weblog that I called a hiatus on recently, I started getting 4-8 spam comments daily for several days. Now while I already had moderation turned on for comments, it was still a nuisance I had to deal with. I may yet have to deal with it more strongly in the future by blocking a list of IP addresses, if necessary. Steve Pavlina didn’t spell out his specific reasons, but he did say that comment moderation was a draining activity.
  3. Trackback comments, on the other hand, are generated when someone writes their own blog entry that references your site. Since spambloggers don’t generally write content, you will not have  spambacks. (At least not that I’ve seen so far; fingers crossed.)
  4. Enabling trackback comments encourages people to write posts that reference you, more so than if you only allow regular, manually-submitted comments. This arguably adds a bit more weight and credibility to the trackback comment, and thus might encourage other readers to visit the linking site.

Now here’s where I think that Steve Pavlina is even more of a genius than he already is, whether by design or not. By allowing only trackback comments, he’s either intentionally or unintentionally guaranteed that if you really want to comment on something he’s written, you’ll write your own post linking to him. Not only does he get you to write something possibly more lasting than a comment, but he also gets you to link to him.

Let that sink in for a moment. Some sites do not allow your comment to link back to your site. Some do. So comments are one-directional at best. Trackback comments, on the other hand, produce bi-directionality: links in both directions. The value of this is that many search engines and blog directories (such as Technorati) give your site more visibility as you gain an increasing number of links. I’m not talking about PageRank; if Nick says that links don’t matter, he needs a cyberspanking 🙂

That said, what Steve’s site does not have is an interactive discussion between readers. So while the linking is bidirectional, the conversation is not. Thus, disabling commenting in favour of just trackbacks might not be something you want for your own blog. However, if your blog does not have trackbacks enabled at all, I highly encourage you to turn them on to supplement commenting. Unfortunately, some blog platforms just do not support them. This includes Blogger.com and some platforms that do not fully support XMLRPC functionality.

Technorati Tags: blog comments, trackbacks, site promotion

Fighting Mobile Bandwidth Costs with RSS

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Nick recently talked about full-text feeds and why he felt that they were good. I approached the issue from a different angle: the cost of bandwidth for those of us reading feeds from a PDA/ cellphone/ smartphone. I’m happy to report that a partial solution to the problem exists: offloading.

I use the term offloading in the sense that you offload content to a PDA, after you’ve downloaded it to your desktop. As I found out a couple of days ago, the cost of data bandwidth for a smartphone is immensely higher relative to what a DSL line might cost, monthly. So a simple solution is one that’s actually been in use for several years: offloading.

There are also a number of RSS readers for mobile devices, however, all of them either use a browser or cost money. I know, I know. What’s the big deal with spending a few bucks for software when you’ve spent several hundred for a spiffy new device? Well, a lot of things. Sure I use commercial software, but I mostly try to stick with OpenSource. And I’ve not yet come across such a mobile RSS reader.

I have, however, come across Plucker, which is an OpenSource file format, and Plucker Viewer. Unfortunately, Plucker is only available for PalmOS-based devices for now. The Plucker Desktop and other tools will work on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X desktops/laptops. Maybe someone will help produce a Plucker Viewer for devices running other OSes.

Plucker Viewer runs on your PalmOS device by letting you scroll through Pluckered text/HTML documents, much like an ebook viewer. Plucker Desktop lets you define channels for mobile editions of websites, schedule channel updates, and convert to Plucker format. You then hotsync the document(s) to your PalmOS device.

What Plucker cannot handle yet is RSS feeds. (It supposedly handles RDF feeds and PDF documents, but I saw no proof of this in the help files.) So in comes Sunrise Desktop (which also runs on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X). Sunrise Desktop is very similar to Plucker Desktop, except that it can convert RSS feeds to Plucker format, as well websites and local text files.

I’m happy because I can download my (partial-text) webfeeds when I’m planning to be offline, then offload the resulting Plucker files to my Palm Treo. But hopefully, Plucker usage will spread and someone will help out so other devices can use the Plucker format. The interesting thing is that Project Gutenberg is now offering some of their free e-texts in Plucker format, so I’m guessing there are more PalmOS-based

Even if you cannot use Plucker Viewer, there are software tools that download mobile editions of websites for whatever OS your PDA uses. So you can still use this technique to save yourself the cost of going online with your PDA. However, you should be aware that downloading more than a few pages of a site all at once classifies the software you are using as a spider/bot. Overdoing the updates may get you banned on some sites. This may or may not be true for RSS feeds.

Technorati Tags: offline content, mobile browsing, plucker, sunrise

Filed Under: RSS