Last week I experimented with LoudTwitter, a tool used to post your Twitter tweets to your blog. I wasn’t sure it would work with a WordPress.com blog, but it does. However, with the number of complaints from readers, it was not welcome on this blog.

LoudTwitter publishes your Twitter tweets in a blog post once a day on your blog using XML-RPC. It will work on self-hosted versions of WordPress and WordPress.com blogs. Just sign up your blog and fill in the information, click through the email verification, set the time you want it posted, and it will automatically post that day’s worth of Twitter tweets on your blog.

It’s important to bring your Twitter posts into some social media services, and your blog posts and other social media services into Twitter, but I’m not sure if Twitter really belongs in a blog post unless you are very active on Twitter and the content within your tweets is extremely valuable to your readers. Having spent a lot of time digging through Twitter over the past year, I’m still hunting for timeless content. It’s there, but it’s like sifting for diamonds among the dust.

Here’s why my experiment didn’t work with LoudTwitter on this blog.

1. Content Not Interesting or Valuable to Readers: While investment opportunities can be overheard at the right parties, if you are at the right party with the right people at the right time, most tweets have little value. A collection of tweets is just a one-sided conversation that may or may not be relevant to your blog’s focus and topic. No one cares much were you are, what you are eating, what television shows you are watching, or your views on politics unless they are friends, family, or obsessed with those particular things. These have nothing to do with your blog on car repair. Or jewelry making. Or building a business. Unless the Twitter content adds to and complements your blog content, it’s not interesting to the readers.
2. Lack of Category Control: LoudTwitter has no method currently to post the Twitter Tweets to a specific blog post category. It just dumps your Twitter stream direction into a blog post called “Twitter Tweets” in your default post category. This means that if “uncategorized” is your default post category, it is found there. If LoudTwitter had category control, then the content could be put into a category of its own on your blog. You could move that category off your front page and even out of your blog post feed. Those digging for those tidbits of information found within your tweets could still find it, and those wanting to monitor your tweets on your blog could do so. There are better ways to monitor your tweets away from your blog and no one wants to see them as full blown blog posts. Really?
3. No Control Over Post Titles: LoudTwitter publishes the post title as “Twitter Tweets”, though it does allow you to add content to the beginning and end of your blog post Twitter Tweet summaries. In your most recent post listing, the reader will see:
   • Twitter Tweets
   • Twitter Tweets
   • Twitter Tweets
   • Twitter Tweets
   • Twitter Tweets
   • Twitter Tweets

   Not very helpful post titles. WordPress won’t allow duplicate post title names, so the permalink becomes twitter-tweets-2, twitter-tweets-3, and so on. Not very SEO friendly nor informative.

4. It’s a One-Sided Conversation: Not only are Twitter tweets probably not relevant to your blog’s content, it’s a one-sided conversation. Without the other side of the conversation, there is a huge loss of context. It’s like walking into a conversation just as someone says something that could be a foot-in-the-mouth comment if you don’t know what preceded it. It’s confusing and often useless information.
5. No Editing Capability on Twitter: I work very hard to ensure my blog posts are as clean and neat as any term paper with careful attention to grammar and spelling - even though some slip through. However, Twitterers tend to tweet while walking down the street, talking on the phone, and doing other distracting things like driving which causes a lot of errors. They also abbreviate terms and phrases that might make no sense to the uninitiated. Once a tweet is released on Twitter, you can’t easily take it back and edit it. To then have it re-published on your blog compounds your gaf.
6. No Tweets Today? Then What? Busy with recent speaking gigs and traveling, I’ve been offline more than on, so what happens when you aren’t twittering? What’s published on your blog? This Twitter Tweets is an example of what happens. I don’t quite understand why there are two tweets when I wasn’t on Twitter, but there it is. Literally nothing is posted. What good is a wasted empty post? It doesn’t serve your readers. A conditional option would be beneficial to restrict LoudTwitter (or its equivalent) to not publish if you have less than 2 tweets in a day.

Here is an example of the one-sided conversation from my recent experiment.

# 11:46 Idiot Alert: I recorded video atbwe08 vertical not horizontal. ARGH! How do I flip or rotate digital video?
# 11:59 @vegasgeek yep!!! Lay down video - new style. Everyone lays down. So used to still, didn’t think about horz vs vert. SIGH.
# 11:59 @wiredprworks Will be posting how WordPress changed your life video and video of talk after weekend’swordcampportland. Going to ROCK!
# 12:20 @GlendaWH Hey, my new dear friend! lorelleonwordpress at gmail - Your video is ~3 minutes on how WordPress changed your life!
# 12:21 @vegasgeek LOL That’s the solution for sure. But I like the idea of 200 people laying down to watch much better. Fun atwordcampportland!
# 12:53 @bkajino Can’t wait forwordcampportland You know I’m also talking about Woopra??? Will have some goodies for those attending, I hope!
# 12:54 OMG Did you all see that I’m on the cover of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine?! Bunch of my articles in there. Wow! Didn’t know untilbwe08
# 13:11 @GlendaWH Can’t find your card - found Darrell’s so I emailed him with notes. CAn’t wait!!!
# 13:18 Ever have one of those days when you wonder why you blog? Back frombwe08 I shouldn’t but tired out. Need kick.
# 14:21 @WatershedStudio Blogger and Podcaster Rock Star? right? I was so stunned to see my name on the cover. I’m just little ol’ me.
# 14:22 @gregbd Right, but not separate. Your blog is yr online resume today. Social business model circles around it. Start blog first then social
# 14:45 Idiot Alert Off. FOUND IT! How to flip a vertical video back to horizontal. is.gd/31N1 Simple and easy! Whew.
# 14:56 Michael Moore giving away next movie tinyurl.com/5dkqm8 Slacker Uprising. Another example of how free giveaways make money?
# 16:13 @vegasgeek What dates are you thinking for WordCamp Vegas? WordCamp Denver scheduling for Jan and don’t want to overlap.
# 20:28 4 WordCamps this weekend: Portland, Toronto, Utah, Vancouver(BC) WordPresswordcamp weekend!
# 22:06 @MikePerry Thanks. It was a surprise to me atbwe08. Great timing. Blogger and Podcaster Magazine doing some interesting stuff lately.
# 22:07 YEAH! Raw fooder! Check out the raw food porn book “Raw” by Charlie Trotter. Too much trouble to cook but sexy pics.
# 22:08 @vegasgeek Denver wanted the same dates for their WordCamp. Will let them know and maybe they can change them. Thanks much!
# 22:14 @gregbd BuddyPress WordPress Theme on steroids is doing that as are others. Connecting the dots. We need more dot connectors to stop scatter.

Can you really follow it? Does it really add value to this blog?

Twitter is invaluable. With help from those following me, I was able to quickly find a method to flip videos I’d made at Blog World Expo from vertical to horizontal. I was also able to help WordPress and Woopra users find the help and information they needed. I was also easily able to promote my upcoming events and speaking gigs as well as other WordPress events.

It’s the value of my tweets and using LoudTwitter on my blog that I question. If you are hosting Twitter tweets with any service on your blog, is it really helpful? Do you have category and post title control? Does it really benefit your readers?

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog.

While you may have never noticed, those who are not logged into WordPress.com will see ads on blogs across the WordPress.com network. two years ago, WordPress.com started experimenting with Google ads to help support the cost of the experimental and state-of-the-art multiple user free blog service. The intent was not to cover your blogs with ads, like many free blogging services do, but to show an occasional ad discretely within your WordPress Theme.

Since few complained or noticed, the experiment continued, helping to keep WordPress.com free and add a lot of free features that might have been paid upgrades.

These ads were so rare, I never saw them. So I forgot about them. I’ve written a lot about the WordPress.com Terms of Service policy that prohibits adding ads to your WordPress.com blogs, so I was dismayed a few months ago when I got a few emails accusing me of special favors from WordPress.com because I had ads on my blog. They were seeing the WordPress.com experimental ads. Unfortunately, one of the ads was - shall we say - inappropriate, a problem many have with Google’s ad program.

Still, this bothered me. I talked to the WordPress team about this and they agreed that users should have the right to determine whether or not to have WordPress.com ads on their blogs. As Matt explains:

At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.

They’ve been working on this new feature for a while, trying to come up with a secure and affordable way for users to continue to support WordPress.com by permitting ads on their blogs, while allowing those with sensitive or special interests to not host ads. They’ve finally done it, and I applaud their foresight and integrity.

Removing Ads from Your WordPress.com Blog

Before you start jumping to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, remember that those ads, most of which you will rarely ever see, help bring in income to keep WordPress.com going. If they don’t bother you or your readers, leave them alone. Why not?

You are using one of the most powerful, state-of-the-art blogging platforms, a service that will survive the Digg-effect and high traffic surges without charging you; a service that keeps bringing you options and features without charge; a service that gives you a platform upon which to express yourself proudly - and is incredibly SEO friendly. Why not help them continue to keep this service free for everyone?

If you do feel a compelling need to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, go to Upgrades.

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

The cost to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog is 30 credits annually (USD $30 if you haven’t earned any credits) which comes to eight cents a day.

Whether you keep or remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, why not take a little time to give back to WordPress.com and other WordPress.com users by browsing the WordPress blog network and get to know your fellow WordPress.com members. You can use the Random Post feature in the gray dashboard bar at the top of your WordPress.com blog when you are logged in, or visit the WordPress.com Blogs of the Day which lists the most popular blogs by language, or the WordPress.com Tags list.

If you are familiar with how WordPress.com works, then why not help out in the WordPress.com forums and get to know the volunteers and staff there as well as your other fellow WordPress.com members. It’s a simple way to say thank you for this powerful free blog service.

I Want to Put Ads on My WordPress.com Blog

A lot of WordPress.com bloggers want to put ads on their blogs to make money for themselves. While some free blog hosts permit that, don’t forget that WordPress.com is also a testing site for many of the latest features of WordPress development.

While the world has to wait for the release of WordPress 2.7, WordPress.com users are already using the new sticky post feature and will soon be playing with other new features as part of the new WordPress Administration interface redesign, a continuation of user interface improvements from the previous version of WordPress - long before anyone else.

This means that WordPress.com has to stay clean of code that will screw up not just one blog but all the blogs on the WordPress.com network powered by WordPressMU. While most ad code is harmless, opening up WordPress.com to Javascript and other code languages opens the door up to malicious code, too. It’s a security risk WordPress.com isn’t willing to take, and I support that policy.

If you want to monetize your blog, get the free version of WordPress and pay for cheap hosting. Some hosts are offering web hosting for under USD $10 a month. With the full version of WordPress, you can not only add ads, but customize the whole look, add all kinds of cool WordPress Plugins, and really tweak your whole site to maximize its revenue potential.

WordPress.com has always been about blogging, about freedom of expression and creativity. It’s not about the code. It’s about the words. WordPress.com is working overtime to make sure we have a place to share our words with others around the world - no holds barred.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

In 2006, I completed a year long informal study on several of my blogs about the best times and days for me to publish content on my blogs and published what I learned in When is the Best Time and Day to Post on Your Blog? My conclusions were that Mondays and Tuesdays were the highest traffic days, thus the best days for publishing content with the hopes to be seen by regular readers, and that I needed to publish my posts prior to 0400 EST for my content to be there before my readers showed up.

With the improvements in the WordPress.com stats feature (available for self-hosted blogs with the WordPress.com Stats WordPress Plugin), I’ve been noticing another interesting trend that supports my original conclusions.

There is a clear cyclical nature to my blog traffic, which drops every weekend. In this example of my daily stats across a month, the low points on the chart are:

• Saturday, May 17
• Sunday, May 18
• Saturday, May 24
• Sunday, May 25
• Saturday, May 31
• Sunday, June 1
• Saturday, June 7
• Sunday, June 8

Monday and Tuesday are high traffic, with the numbers dropping towards the weekend, except for the occasional drift upwards for a day due to a popular post released midweek.

When I compare the numbers across six months, this cyclical nature is not as clear as it is close up, day by day. It’s there. In spite of the traffic spikes, the cyclical up and down of the weekends continues. There is consistent growth, but the weekend downturns keep the growth slow by averaging out the daily numbers. Looking at just the numbers doesn’t help. Seeing the visual chart does. And seeing it across weeks shows slips down in my blog stats, right?

Many stats watchers freak out when they concentrate on the day-to-day stats. Like watching the stock market too closely, decisions are made without looking at the big picture. I’ve heard panic from many bloggers who scream their stats have suddenly plunged. When you change the view from day-to-day to week-to-week, or even month-to-month, the picture changes. It’s now about the big picture of trends, not the daily fluctuation, some of them normal but noticed for the first time.

Since blog statistics were introduced at the end of 2005 on WordPress.com blogs, my blog has seen steady growth over the years. By focusing on the long term, I see the big picture of growth and stop worrying about the day-to-day fluctuation - unless I want to learn something from those statistics.

In this case, my conclusions from early in 2006 were supported. There is a weekend fluctuation in the numbers that I’ve been able to track for the past two years, in addition to the historical research I did in 2006. Mondays and Tuesdays continue to be my best days for traffic.

This applies to my blogs and would be different in different cultures and countries, as well as different blog subject matters. Have you looked at the different groups of stats available on your blog and found similar or different conclusions?

And if you are still daily checking in with your stats, stop it. Live a little. Spend more time writing quality content, not checking the numbers. The numbers over weeks and months will tell you more about how your blog is doing than the daily obsession checks. However, there is still something to be learned from the daily numbers, when compared to the overall whole health of your blog traffic.

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Site Search Tags: blogging tips, blog stats, blog statstics, wordpress.com, wordpressdotcom, wordpress tips, wordpress.com stats, stats wordpress plugin, examining blog stats, when is the best time to post, when is the best time to blog, blog publishing

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

As discussed in WordPress.com Banned Again: Why Aren’t You Concerned?, WordPress.com continues to be a target for censorship and blocking from various countries and groups around the world attempting to penalize the whole for the “wrongs” of the few the courts or governments decide to penalize, those cutting off thousands of blogs from access.

I was also recently blocked from accessing Gmail and this WordPress.com blog from a free hotel WIFI in Chicago, which inspired me to write How Do You Know If Your Blog is Banned or Blocked? on the Blog Herald, as your blog can be blocked from anywhere at any time, not just by a country or legal decision. Bans and blocks can happen from companies, educational institutions, public WIFI access points, Internet Providers, and more.

I contacted WordPress.com support about the options and did some digging to find out how WordPress.com bloggers were getting around the blocks and what WordPress.com bloggers can do.

According to WordPress.com support, mapping your domain to a WordPress.com account will not avoid the blocks that ban by IP address. The request goes to the WordPress.com nameservers which trigger the blocks. So adding the Domain Mapping feature will not get around the bans.

However, working with client side proxy software or online web proxy servers, using web proxy browser extensions, and some other techniques allow web savvy users to bypass most of these blocks and filters not only to read the blocked blogs but access and blog on blocked blog services.

Here are some options to try to access a blocked WordPress.com blog as well as other blocked or banned sites.

Client Side Proxy Software

By installing client side proxy software, you can get get around strong firewalls like the ones in China, a technique used by many high tech companies inside and outside of China, often developed by technology experts in Chinese companies.

Client side proxy software allows a user to securely bypass content-filtering systems set up by governments and corporate networks. According to Wikipedia regarding Psiphon, a popular web proxy program, it is described as:

…a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored, [which] turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere.

By bypassing the blocks, the web is an open door. Some popular proxy software include:

• UltraSurf
• Gpass
• Java Anon Proxy
• Psiphon
• Blue Coat
• Privoxy
• SafeSquid
• Squid Cache

Online Web Proxy Bypass Sites

There are a variety of online web proxy bypass sites which allow free access to blocked and banned sites. They have a variety of features and abilities, and may take several tries and testing of options to access some banned and blocked sites. By using online proxy sites, the site blocks your IP address and other information, allowing your visit to the site to go through without interference.

These sites may not always allow you access to blog on a blocked blog, but they do permit reading and often commenting on most banned blogs and sites. To access a banned or blocked blog as the blog owner and contributor, enter the WordPress.com login URL.

Visit the site and enter the blocked site’s URL into the form. You can use their default proxy services or select from various options to access the blocked site.

There are many online web proxy server sites, and a few popular ones include:

• Anonymouse.org
• findwealth.info
• freebrowse.info
• Good Waiter
• netonomous.net
• surfingtoday.info
• wikiproxy.com
• FilterNot - Bypass Internet Filters
• surfingstore.info
• proxy.org

Using a Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Network

You can also get around some blocks using a peer-to-peer content distribution network, such as Coral CDN. A content distribution network (CDN) is what popular file sharing networks are based upon, server-based networks with content-delivery, request-routing, file distribution, and accounting infrastructures. By maximizing bandwidth and time savings by content replication across the servers, access is faster and cheaper through the network than by relying upon one server located thousands of miles away. A web user can also navigate through the content distribution network to hide or confuse their IP address, thus allowing access to banned or blocked sites.

Corel offers easy bypassing of some firewall and site blocks by adding .nyud.net or .nyud.net:8090 to the URL of the site. For a WordPress.com site:

http://example.wordpress.com/

would be

http://example.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/

To use this with my article on Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Guide, the link would be:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2006/01/15/dyi-search-engine-optimization/

You can do this manually, or use one of the Coral Clients for Firefox, Greasemonkey, Opera, and Internet Explorer or one of the Corel browser plugins. It will work with Windows, Max, Linus, BSD, and most other operating systems.

If you are offering content specifically for readers often found behind firewalls, why not help them by adding the Coral link code to your outgoing links so they can access blocked and banned content without stress nor struggle.

Browser Extensions

There are a few browser extensions and add-ons that will help you get through various firewalls. Choose one appropriate to your web browser.

• PhProxy - InBasic Firefox Add-ons
• Proxytex FireFox Exention
• IE7Pro with web proxy protection
• Proxy Offline Browser
• TorButton for Firefox
• FoxyProxy for Firefox
• Gladder (Great Ladder) FireFox Extension
• BlockStop Proxy Firefox Add-on
• Tor-Proxy.NET Toolbar
• SwitchProxy Tool for Firefox
• Access from China, Firefox edition
• Access from China, Safari (under Mac) edition

More Solutions to Bypass Firewalls and Bans

Tor is a privacy project and program run by volunteers that works by bouncing your online communications around a distributed network of relays, similar to a content distribution network but the project is designed to block tracking and spying on your Internet activity. It protects your privacy such as blocking your physical site location and works with web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote logins and other TCP protocol access applications. By blocking information on your web traffic stats and path, Tor may help some uses bypass firewalls and blocks to access, and does protect your private information from being tracked completely, which is why many recommend the Tor Bundle, which includes Tor, TorCP and Privoxy.

You can also add an Automatic proxy configuration file to your computer and browser that will type into your browser, such as FireFox, to bypass some preventions. For information and details see:

• Access Blogger and WordPress Blogs in China
• How To Spot A Blogspot and WordPress.com Blog (A Quick Fix)
• Hiding Your IP Address Using HTTP, CONNECT, CGI/PHP/WEB, SOCKS proxies
• Another way to visited the banned blogspot and WordPress.com
• Proxy Hacks - I.(Updated) Blocked at workplace? Setting up a home proxy for WordPress.com and other sites. Browse all blocked sites and run all messengers.

For more information on the variety of techniques and tips for bypassing most firewall restrictions and blocks, see:

• How to Bypass Most Firewall Restrictions and Access the Internet
• HOWTO bypass Internet Censorship, a tutorial on getting around Internet blocks and filters
• How to Surf the Web Anonymously With Proxies
• How To Bypass Internet Censorship And Filters: A Guide To Filters and Anonymous Browsing
• 9 Firefox Extensions to Protect Your Privacy

China is not the only one blocking WordPress.com, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and many other social networking, bookmarking, and blog sites. Recent blocks include Brazil and Turkey. You can learn more on Internet censorship on Wikipedia and Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China.

Related Articles

• Content Theft and WordPress
• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
• Attack of the Mean Commenter: Blocking Commenters and Comments on Your WordPress Blog
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• Fortune Cookie Blogging
• The Committee to Protect Bloggers - Risking Your Life for Your Words
• Biggest Copyright Infringement in the World But Nobody Cares Enough
• Full Disclosure on Corporate and Commercial Blogs
• Michael Crichton - Freedom of Speech vs. Patented Speech
• Mean Spirited Comments and Blogging
• Just a Reminder About Freedom: Blogging Comes With a Price
• Freedom of Speech - Bloggers Legal Rights

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

By Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today

Users of the self-hosted version of WordPress have always had a lot of tools for protecting their site and their feeds. They have always had a variety of plugins for protecting content, including anti-scraping, content theft detection and much more.

Even the ability to edit themes and the core WordPress files has proved useful in some cases allowing users to replicate the effects of some of the more popular plugins without having to install them.

Users of WordPress.com, however, are much more limited in what they can do. With no plugins and limited ability to edit the site’s appearance or core files, they can’t use many of the tools that hosted WordPress users take for granted.

However, this is not to say that WordPress.com users are helpless, With a little bit of creativity, they can mimic the effects of many of the most valuable content protection plugins.

Detecting Scraping

The most powerful tool currently available for detecting RSS scraping is a digital fingerprint. A fingerprint is a string of characters that you add to your RSS feed to make it easy to search for scraped content later. Plugins such as the Digital Fingerprint Plugin and Copyfeed are normally used to add the fingerprint to the feed and search for matches.

However, a digital fingerprint, in truth, is little more than a signature added to each post, similar to the one Lorelle adds to all of her entries. Adding it doesn’t require a plugin or an edit of the core files, but merely placing the information into each post.

To aid with that, you can use a variety of tools, such as Shortkeys, to automate and standardize the signature insertion. Also, like Lorelle, you can add images or other components as you see fit to ensure that, even if your feed is copied that it carries with it information that clearly identifies the source.

Even if you forget to insert the signature into a few posts, merely putting it in the majority will ensure that scrapers will pick up the signature the same as they would had you used a plugin. Best of all, using Google Alerts, you can fully automate the detection of the fingerprint and be routinely emailed about any new matches that appear.

All in all, though it adds an extra step before posting entries to your blog, it is fairly trivial for WordPress.com users to mirror the effect of the various digital fingerprint plugins and gain all of the benefits they provide.

Blocking Scrapers

With plugins such as Antileech and Wp-Ban, many WordPress users actively ban and prohibit scrapers from accessing their feed. However, without direct access to the server, WordPress.com users are more limited in what they can do along those lines.

Still, for extreme cases, you may be able to contact WordPress Support and see if they can assist in blocking the scraper. They have done so in the past with extreme cases, such as with Bitacle, when multiple WordPress blogs may be involved.

However, such action should be reserved for extreme cases and only after other steps such as contacting the host have failed. It simply is not practical for Automattic to ban every scraper and there will be many scrapers which can not be banned no matter what.

Other Tricks

With all of that in mind, here are a few other tricks that WordPress.com users can take advantage of to help them protect their writing on the Web.

1. Google Alerts: In addition to checking for your Digital Fingerprint, you can also insert unique phrases from your static content, such as your pages, to receive alerts when they are copied.
2. Anti-Plagiarism Tools: Although they are somewhat limited in their detection ability, sites such as Copyscape and Bitscan can be great for quick plagiarism checks and can alert you to content reuse that you might not have otherwise known about.
3. Non-Repudiation: Even though most will never require it, non-repudiation services can provide valuable support in the event of a dispute over ownership of a work. MyFreeCopyright provides a free non-repudiation service that does not require a WordPress plugin to function, rather, it accesses the feed every day automatically.
4. Truncated Feeds: WordPress.com users do have the ability to provide a partial feed, rather than their full content, by editing the settings in their dashboard under Options/Reading. However, I generally do not recommend this course of action as it upsets regular readers as well as thwarting scrapers.
5. Checking Stats: The statistics provided by default with your WordPress account are very good for detecting potential infringements. Since many scrapers and even human plagiarists leave links intact, you can check for suspicious referrers and inbound links so long as you routinely link to your own articles.
6. Akismet: Many scrapers, when reposting your content, will send trackbacks or pingbacks to your site. Akismet does a good job filtering those out, but it is important to look through the spam and moderated queue in order to locate any spam that might indicate scraping.

Though many of these tips and tricks are available to bloggers no matter where they post their content, the fact that they are so widely available is what makes them so useful, anyone, regardless of where they are hosted, can take advantage of them.

However, WordPress does provide a good set of default tools for its free users, including Akismet and their stats panel. This gives WordPress.com an extra advantage when dealing with people misusing their content, an advantage they should certainly use.

Conclusions

While there is little doubt that WordPress.com users have a more limited tool set than those who host their own blogs, that is not to say that they are helpless or otherwise unable to protect their work.

The tools other bloggers use to track and stop copyright infringement are still there, it just may take a little more effort and creativity to get them to work.

Fortunately, users of WordPress.com still have the ability to fight back and WordPress itself provides many of the tools that that you need by default. Much of the process is just a matter of taking the information you are given, and applying it in a whole new way.

WordPress.com has activated a feature without warning that has many up in arms of protest, making it one of the least welcoming additions to WordPress.com.

Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the links link to WordPress.com blogs, not our own.

This is bad for many reasons, which I’m sure you’ve already thought of. No control. Implied recommendation or endorsement. Inappropriate links. And a lot of confusion for our readers who believe we choose these links or that they will lead to links on our blog related to what we blog about. I’m sure I missed some other bad reasons for not liking this new feature.

It’s important that we link to other bloggers, especially others within the WordPress.com community to support and encourage them. It’s wrong to do so without some control.

You can read the announcement, Possibly Related Posts, on the WordPress.com blog.

My apologies to those who have been led astray by these links in my own blog posts. Thank you to everyone who brought this to my attention, worried something was wrong. I even had a couple people warn me that my blog had been hacked as the links were definitely inappropriate. Thank you for worrying and watching out for me and my blog.

Note: According to a comment Matt Mullenweg made on a forum post:

In the next few days we’ll have an update that allows you to block specific blogs from showing up, and eventually that setting will also apply to the tag surfer, blog surfer, and top blogs so when you block a blog you should never see it again.

With 3 million blogs - albeit less than a million active - I don’t have enough life to block all the blogs that show up as “possibles” in every list on every blog post. I cannot imagine the implementation of such a process. I’d rather choose who I link to than have to exclude them.

Among the links on my blog posts here that I tested before turning off the feature, the average was 2 in seven links per post having a vague relationship to my content. The majority of the links went to non-English blogs, blogs no longer updated (since 2006 in several cases), and totally unrelated content, such as an article about a WordPress Plugin for creating, among other things, related posts, linking to A Third of Patients On Transplant List Are Not Eligible from the Washington Post. I just learned that the Washington Post has blogs on WordPress.com, but what transplants have to do with WordPress…well, it’s anyone’s guess. Either way, 28 percent average “success” rate isn’t good enough for me. Nor is adding to my workload.

To Turn Off Related Posts on WordPress.com

To turn off the new related post feature on WordPress.com blogs:

1. Go to the Administration Panels > Design > Extras.
2. Check Hide Related Links.
3. Click Update.

Have Your Say on the New Possibly Related Posts Feature

If you are not a fan of the implementation of this related posts feature, let your voice be heard. Many are reporting links to inappropriate blogs and content, and some worry about where these links are sending their readers.

You can comment on the following WordPress.com Forums discussions:

• I DON’T WANT POSSIBLY RELATED LINKS ON MY POSTS
• OMG! Not MORE WP Changes!
• Possibly related Posts
• Possibly Related Posts and trolls/attacks
• link that is not mine is on my post! not visible in editor
• “Possibly Related Posts” Suddenly Showing up for One Post Only w/NSFW Content

Create Your Own Related Posts Feature on WordPress.com Blogs

I share how I manually create my related posts at the bottom of my blog posts in Which WordPress Plugins Does Lorelle on WordPress Use?, Adding a Signature To Personalize Your Blog Post, and WordPress.com Blog Bling: Signatures and Writing Code.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

According to Brazil: Bloggers united against WordPress.com ban by Global Voices, WordPress.com blogs are or soon will be banned due to a judge in Brazil ruling against a WordPress.com blogger featuring a YouTube video embedded in the blog of a couple having sex.

The details of the blogger and content in question is a bit vague, but this is not the first time, nor the last, that international courts have made a sweeping judgment against WordPress.com due to the actions of an individual blogger. This ban blocks not only blogs in that language, but all WordPress.com blogs, which is currently approaching 3 million.

There are two issues I want to address:

1. What responsibility does WordPress.com have towards its banned blogs and the international courts?
2. Why aren’t more bloggers talking about blogs and bloggers being banned?

I’d love to say a lot more about how senseless such legal rulings are, but let’s address the issue of common sense and responsibility.

What Responsibility Should WordPress.com Bear?

Celso Bessa Post-its on WordPress.com wrote an open letter to Automattic and WordPress.com Team asking for specific help to protect access to WordPress.com blogs from Brazil. Help I believe should be answered on the official WordPress.com Pages and Terms of Service to help other judicial courts act against an individual without punishing the whole:

By providing the Brazilian Court with a technical report and knowledge support about the best way to handle the blocking order of this specific blog, without compromising the access to wordpress.com.

The other two requests by the author are to provide enough time for the blog owner to respond and defend their rights, and to provide the information on the issue to the blogosphere so the public can have their say. I argue both from a business perspective.

I agree bloggers should have the right, and time, to defend themselves, which WordPress.com staff does provide, as long as the issue is between WordPress.com and the blogger directly, and/or another blogger. For instance, if a WordPress.com bloggers is found to be violating copyrights by plagiarizing content or violating the WordPress.com Terms of Service with advertising, they are often warned several times before the content, and/or the blog, is shut down. When possible, WordPress.com bloggers are given every chance to make appropriate changes, but if you are blatantly doing wrong, they have a fast trigger finger on the Delete Blog button, which is why WordPress.com continues to get the highest ratings and honors as a clean, splog-free blog service.

When it comes to legal decisions, WordPress.com must respond accordingly - though they do often work with the blogger in question to handle the issue on their blog - again, when possible and within the scope of their responsibilities.

The place for bloggers to defend themselves is in court.

WordPress.com offers a free platform for people to have their say, but they cannot be held responsible for all the rules in the world that dictate what form that “say” should be in, as that form often conflicts directly with the rules somewhere else in the world. To be the legal arbitrator, or even to be a part of deciding whose rule is right, is way beyond the scope of services like WordPress.com, Blogger, and other free blog hosting services. The author of the content is responsible for their content, and should be tried, held responsible, and punished accordingly.

Should WordPress.com be responsible for establishing a “court of public opinion” for WordPress.com bloggers? Their free blog hosting services does that inherently, but to showcase specific issues is also beyond the scope of WordPress.com, in my opinion.

By publishing such information for public dissemination, WordPress.com becomes responsible for that content. If not written very carefully, with lawyers standing behind the author to take care nothing biased, accusatory, or risky is said, such content can become liable rather than responsible. The grassroots resistance of public opinion happens on the blogs, not with the blog hosts. I believe it should remain with the people.

I believe that WordPress.com should only be liable for the amount you pay to blog on WordPress.com. From a business perspective, that’s common sense.

However, I believe that WordPress.com should continue to stick to its high moral standards for running a clean blog hosting site and take responsibility for helping individual blogs in these cases. Whether they agree or not with the courts ruling, WordPress.com must provide information to the courts on how to block individual and specific WordPress.com blogs. This allows the ruling to target the accused and not penalized a huge community of bloggers - in any language.

What Happened to Our Enthusiasm for Protecting Freedom of Speech?

I think bloggers around the world have become apathetic. Lazy. Uninspired. Dumbed down. Honestly. When the term echo chamber was coined, it was a good label for all the regurgitation of content spread all over the web, drowning individual voices. Self-interest blogging is pervasive. What happened to altruism and using the blog publishing platform to support freedom of speech and bloggers around the world?

What happened to us? Why am I not seeing protests and opinions on this issue all over the web? Why isn’t the banning of three million WordPress.com blogs a big deal? Why aren’t we talking about this instead of the latest iPhone gizmo and useless SEO techniques? Why didn’t people get angry and protest loudly when WordPress.com blogs were banned in Turkey, China, and other countries? WordPress.com continues to be banned in places - why aren’t we talking about this?

Have we really become desensitized to the plight of other bloggers and the oppression of freedom of speech?

We need to find our indignant righteousness again, fellow bloggers. We need to make our voices matter. Three voices should not have to shout to be heard on behalf of millions of bloggers. I want my WordPress.com blog to be read by those in Brazil, Turkey, China, and everywhere in the world. Don’t you? Why should my blog be penalized because of the actions of one?

People are asking Automattic to take a stand. I’m asking bloggers around the world to take a stand and let their voices be heard when others can’t.

Let not millions of bloggers be blocked and banned for the sake of a couple of idiots. You don’t send an entire city’s population to jail because two people break the law. Maybe the world would be a better place if we did, but that’s another discussion.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Get ready to go naked. On April 9th, 2008, hundreds, possibly thousands, of blogs and websites will go naked in honor of CSS Naked Day. Join fellow WordPress bloggers in honoring web designers and WordPress Theme builders by going naked.

This is the third year of the annual CSS Naked Day which honors web design and designers around the world who help make our websites and blogs look “pretty” to the eye while still being totally functional under the hood. Dustin Diaz wanted to give the web world an opportunity to remind everyone of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages, giving a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

As explained yesterday in the Blog Herald announcement of CSS Naked Day, this is also an opportunity to showcase how usable and accessible your web page structure is even without the pretty, reminding the world that it is the law that your website must accessible by everyone using any method to access your blog.

Make Your WordPress Blog Naked

Going naked is easy for WordPress blogs. In Lorelle is Naked, I explained the various options last year on how to turn off your blog’s stylesheet using WordPress Plugins with WordPress Naked Day Plugin for all WordPress versions, CSS Naked Day WordPress Plugin for pre-WordPress 2x blogs, the Naked Day PHP Function script for non-WordPress and PHP driven blogs, do it manually by renaming your blog’s stylesheet for the day, or removing the stylesheet temporarily on WordPress.com blogs.

Recent versions of WordPress will automatically reset to the Default WordPress Theme if no Theme is detected, which means changing the style.css file will revert your Theme to the Default/Kubrick style. To override this redirection, you must use the WordPress Naked Day Plugin or create a separate Theme that has no styles in the stylesheet, which I’ve prepared just for this event.

I have stripped down the styles in the Default WordPress Theme for current versions of WordPress and pre-WordPress 2.1 versions which changed some of the sidebar tags.

1. Unzip and upload the Theme version of choice to your themes directory.
   • Default Blank WordPress Theme for current versions of WordPress for CSS Naked Day (zip)
   • Default Blank WordPress Theme for CSS Naked Day (Pre-WordPress 2.1) (zip)
2. Activate the Theme through the Presentation or Design panel.
3. Switch back to your regularly scheduled WordPress Theme on April 10.

For those on WordPress.com, you can also participate if you are using the Sandbox WordPress Theme with the WordPress.com CSS Extra feature.

1. From the WordPress Administration Panels, go to Presentation > Edit CSS.
2. Cut ALL of the styles from your custom stylesheet and paste them into a text file. Save it with a name you will remember in a very safe place, leaving a blank stylesheet.
3. Choose the option: Start from scratch and just use this to create a blank stylesheet.
4. Click Save Stylesheet.
5. View your WordPress.com blog and all the design elements will be gone. The layout structure will remain but it will be “naked”.

Reverse the process to restore your Sandbox Theme on April 10.

Be sure and sign up for the CSS Naked Day so your blog will be celebrated as one of those honoring web design and designers. Last year, almost 2,000 sites signed up for CSS Naked Day. So far, the list is over 400. Let your naked stance join with others on April 9.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.