Modern Crusader: Plagiarism Today with Jonathan Bailey

When you look around the world today, especially in the blogosphere, do you find many serious crusaders? I have, and Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today is one of my modern crusader heroes. When it comes to defending copyrights, few are better at digging into the truth and destroying the myths than Jonathan Bailey. While admittedly […]

Stop Content Theft Buttons and Badges

During the recent Bitacle Battle of Blogs, the Stopbitacle.org was started and Stop Bitacle buttons showed up on blogs all over the web. Unfortunately, stopping bitacle, a splog that scrapes your blog’s feed content without permission, is just the top of the splog ice berg. To scrape the whole ice berg of content theft, I’ve […]

Applaud Those Who Warn You: Your Blog’s Content Is Being Stolen

I’ve seen a huge jump in the number of bloggers stunned that they, little blogs on the blogosphere map, are having their content stolen and abused through their feeds. Over and over they say the same thing: “I thought only the top bloggers got their content stolen.” BULL. The joke about size doesn’t matter applies […]

Copyrights and the Blogger: Protect What is Yours

Blog Critics’ article “Copyright And The Blogger Syndicate” discusses the ongoing battle between blog syndication and social networking and copyright protection and sums it up beautifully with two instructions to all bloggers: 1. Protect your blog to begin with. How you go about this, depends largely on whether you’re a contributor to a larger site […]

Maxpower’s Digital Fingerprint WordPress Plugin Updated

By special request and input, Maxpower has updated the Digital FingerPrint WordPress Plugin to add the ability to set the digital fingerprint to display in EVERY post, old and new. I wrote about the Digital Fingerprint WordPress Plugin a few days ago, which puts a unique searchable phrase into your feed content and displays search […]

Idiot Alert: Don’t Share Your GMail RSS Feeds

While many of us blogging bloggers have been doing battle against splogs and content thieves, Inside Google reminds us that blog feeds aren’t the only feeds out there being used and abused: Okay, this should be a no-brainer, but just because Gmail offers RSS feeds doesn’t mean you should offer them to the public. A […]

The Bitacle Battle of Blogs

UPDATE: Many years have passed since this article was published. Recently, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today took a look back at the lessons learned from Bitacle and the battle so many bloggers fought against them. Google now works to prevent and stop such abuse. While the Bitacle model still works, because so many spoke out […]

How To Spot a Splog

After publishing “One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging”, I had several people ask me how to know if a blog is a splog or spam blog. Here are some simple clues to look for. In a Splog, Nothing Adds Up Nor Matches Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than […]

The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking

Stealing content directly off your site or blog and posting it on another blog, or even in magazine, is the most common method of content theft. With the increase in technology, other methods of content theft are growing, and are, unfortunately, easy to do. These include image theft, RSS/feed content theft and website hijacking. Image […]

Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements

I recently discussed your options and what to do if someone steals your content. Now, let’s look at how to find out if someone has stolen your content. There are various ways to find copyright infringements of your photographs and writings. Currently, there isn’t just one source, so check through these different services on a […]

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Having been the target of copyright thieves, and working with writers, authors, and photographers on copyright protection and laws for over 25 years, I thought I’d talk a little about what to do when someone steals your content. First, you noticed that I didn’t say “if” someone steals your content. That was on purpose. With […]

Learning About Blogging and How to Blog

Blogging has entered a realm of its own, from fad to industry. People are entering the blogosphere daily, thousands every day. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years and had no clue I was doing it. It was called “online journaling” and some called it “web diaries” or “blithering idiots writing on the Internet”. I […]