Performancing Services

The Performancing BlogRank Top 100 List

June 27, 2006 by nickw

We’re very proud to announce the Performancing BlogRank Top 100 List list today. After much messing with code, hair pulling and swearing, you can now see the top 100 blogs using Metrics to track their traffic.

BlogRank Widgets

We’ve even made a neat little widget for those of you who’d like to dynamically display their BlogRank on your blogs.

Isn’t it pretty?

It will update daily with your BlogRank as the ranks are calculated (at least for now) nightly.

Note: You must have your stats set to “public” in order to see the rank widget. (It only shows a very high level summary to public)

How BlogRank Is Calculated

Well, that would be telling now wouldnt it? heh..

At present it’s a very simple algorithm based on page views, but we are working on bringing other factors into play in order to create a really useful, interesting list. Keep an eye on it, and do let us know how we’re doing.

Enjoy, and do let us know what you think!

Open Development of Performancing Firefox!

June 23, 2006 by nickw

We’ll want to mess around with it a bit to make sure that all is well and that security is as it should be, but if you’re interested in either working on Performancing Firefox or just checking out the bleeding edge code ahead of general release, we’ll shortly be opening up subversion access to the source code.

W00t!

The code has always been open source of course, but now we’ll be able to invite people in to actively contribute, and with the next version having support for skins and languages and even plugins of its own, it’ll be a lot of fun.

Jed will continue as lead developer of course, but with the extra help, and the kind of creativity try community development can bring, we should all benefit.

Anyone will be able to checkout the latest code, but those with a desire, and the necessary skills to contribute will be able to add to the codebase directly.

If you’re interested, comment here or drop me an email at [email protected] — we’ll automate adding developer access eventually, but for now its all by hand.

Top 20 Blogs, Ranked By Performancing Metrics

June 23, 2006 by Chris Garrett

Would you like to know how your blog compares against the others? A while ago markjoyner asked if we could create a chart showing the top blogs, little did he know we were working on just that (and more).

While we are not quite ready to make a full announcement, as it is Friday I thought it would be fun to just show the top 20. These entries are not filtered in any way apart from to only include those with public stats allowed, and our ranking for this list is purely based on traffic, look to the next announcement for our plans going forward. More news on this next week …

So here you are, the top 20 blogs ranked by Performancing Metrics. Enjoy!

So where do you rank? As mentioned above, this is just a teaser to wet your appetite, more news will be forthcoming soon. One thing you can do in the meantime is make your stats public, without enabling public stats we will not be able to show your ranking. For example, Performancing is really ranked number 41 but a lot of blogs above us keep their stats private. If you want to see your rank switch on public stats before next week!

Upcoming in Performancing for Firefox

June 1, 2006 by jedb

As we’ve talked about before, the next version of Performancing for Firefox is just around the corner.
Originally it was going to be a quick release to add Arabic Localization, Right-to-Left (RTL) support and the Publishing options bug fix, however we have decided to go a bit farther for this release.

New in the upcoming release:

Localization (more languages)
Right-to-Left (RTL) support
API for easy customising
API for easy skinning (more on these last two below)

As Nick recently mentioned we are looking for translating partners so that this next version of PFF can reach a larger group of users in their own language.

Specifically if you know of, or work with a non-english Blogging community that would be interested in promoting PFF and assisting with the translation, send them our way. Even if you don’t, individual translators are welcome and encouraged to sign up and help out.

We are aiming to finalize the UI strings by the end of the weekend so leave a comment, or PM me if you are interested.

The Current Localization Teams Are:

Romanian

Bobby

Portugese

Jo’o
Ricardo
Nuno
Leo

Dutch

Eljo
Ruben

Italian

Nicola

French

Simon

German

Thorsten

Spanish

Mariano
Jed Brown

Chinese

Turkish

mersenne

Arabic

Done!

As you can see, there are still plenty of languages that are missing.

Theme (skin) API

One of the new features will be CSS themes.
Basically we will allow you to easily create a new .CSS file and load it into PFF to change the way it looks. The main idea here is to have fun customizing pff’s look with the possibility of creating a new default pff theme.

Customization API

As with the Skin API, we’d like to make it easy for the comunity to ‘extend’ PFF and create new tabs with your own content.
The key here is to make it easy to add content, yet provide the user with control to easily install, enable and disable them.
A few simple examples someone could create off the top of my head

Embed FireFTP in PFF
Add an EBAY tab to track your auctions
Web Authoring tools for easy blogging like color pickers, css references, etc.
You idea here!…

We are interested in your feedback and if you’d find this useful at all or have any suggestions.

Announcing Performancing Launchpad

May 30, 2006 by nickw

Today, we’re pleased to unveil a new service that allows people to post new gadgets, plugins, services, sites and blogs aimed at the blogging community. Performancing Launchpad will be a great place to get your service or product peer reviewed by the Performancing audience, and kickstart a launch aimed at bloggers.

How it Works

If you’re launching a new service or site aimed at bloggers, take a look at the Launchpad Guidelines then simply hit Create Content over on the right, and choose launchpad. Fill in the form, and away you go!

Who Is It For?

Launchpad is for anyone creating something cool for bloggers. It would suit the web2.0 crowd, aswell as new sites aimed at bloggers. It would be ideal for new plugins, and services that add value for bloggers in general.

If you’re unsure of whether your service fits the bill, you’re welcome to email me or Chris anytime (nick@, chris@).

Kicking It Off

Good friend of Performancing Chris Matthieu from Numly has been kind enough to kick the new service off prior to official launch, with a Launchpad for his new product Bookfob, so that should give you an idea of how it works.

All feedback gratefully received, and of course we’re all looking forward to seeing what you’re making out there!

Translating Performancing Firefox – Looking for Partners

May 26, 2006 by nickw

We’re getting pretty close to releasing the next version of Performancing Firefox, and it promises to be a significant release in that for the first time, users will be able to use the blogosphere’s #1 blogging tool in their own language. Provided we can enlist your help with translations of course.

Looking for Partners

When we release in new languages, it would be a good idea to be able to promote Performancing Firefox in the local language, and for that, we’re looking to team up with people and organizations that have a [insert language here] audience that will be able to let their readers/users know about the language release aswell as help us maintain the translation files and address the Performancing audience in that language in the form of an announcement here on the site.

In return, we would like to help promote you or your service to those of our memebers that speak your language.

Who this Would Work Well For

If you run a blogging service, or a popular blog in your own language, please contact me ([email protected]) in english. We are already teaming up with some great folks for an Arabic version of PFF and would love to speak to people initially about other major languages before we start tackling smaller ones.

How YOU Can Help

If you’re German, French, Spanish, Chinese […..] and do not run a popular site/service in your language, you can still help, and we’d be very very grateful if you would.

What we’d like, is to make contact with Performancing members that can help us reach the right people to team up with, and work with us as liasons to those groups. Again, please email me at [email protected]

We’d also welcome any comments and pointers or suggestions you may have on the subject in general, and the comments section of this thread is the best spot for discussion

Thanks everyone!

Protecting Your Copyrights Online – An Interview With Jonathan Bailey

May 10, 2006 by Raj Dash

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?

Firefox, the Social Browser

May 3, 2006 by nickw

Since we launched Performancing Firefox last year, the app has just gone from strength to strength. With the lastest 1.2 release and the integration of Metrics, I think we’re finally getting close to the blogging app nirvana we envisioned when Jed and I first talked about it.

Initially there was a lot of talk about it being a “Flock killer” (for those that dont know, Flock is a browser forked off of the core Firefox code with some good developers and some eager investors behind it). And in a way, though it was never intended to be, it is. I’ve done a lot of interviews and had a lot of conversations where people have bought it up, but i’ve never posted about it. Untill today that is.

Why People Hate Flock

I think part of the success of PFF was due to backlash aimed at Flock. Don’t get me wrong, PFF is an awesome app, I use it every day and Jed does a terrific job of continually developing it, it’s just that I dont think it would have taken off in quite such a large way initially if there wasn’t a lot of resentment out there already for Flock. Firefox users are an extremely passionate, loyal group (i know, i am one..), and they saw Flock as an insult.

When we launched, one of the Flock devs described PFF as “Firefox and ductape”, but at the end of the day, what could be more “web2.0″” than extending an already fantastic platform? I don’t want to switch browsers, I just want to be able to build my OWN browser, which is exactly what Firefox allows me to do.

Firefox is a social browser. Flock is a mistake.

What’s Next for Performancing Firefox?

I’ve been chatting to Jed and Chris, and there are a few things on the horizon, but we’ve not nailed anything down tight just yet except localizatoin. Bust so you get an idea of what we’re thinking, and so that I can start the ball rolling and get some feedback, here’s the list:

Localization – we’re looking for major language blog services to team up on versions of performancing for their languages
Going truly open source – it was always the intention to have others work on this, and now i think it might be the right time to start looking at the code, and options available to us to invite others in to work on PFF
Plugin architecture – PFF should be a platform not a plugin 🙂
General code improvements and bug fixes, naturally

Give us your thoughts, what do you want to see from PFF?

Bug reports and support requests will be nuked, there’s a forum for that. Thanks!

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