The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Copyrights for You and Your Content Sources

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone I know I just recommended aggregating news stories from sources outside of your blog in my series on The Art of the Fan-Based Blog, and that search engines were your friend. They are. However, I cannot stress this enough, be extremely mindful of every single word or […]

Content Theft and WordPress

I and many WordPress “representatives”, along with the developers and staff of WordPress and Automattic, are getting more and more complaints and requests for help dealing with content theft issues. We all need to clear this up and spread the word about how this works in relationship to WordPress. In order to go after a […]

How to Stop Content Theft: The Best Tips

One of my heroes, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, whom I’ve written much about and love his work on the Blog Herald, has simplified the issue of content theft into two brilliant and understandable articles. 5 Content Theft Myths and Why They Are False deals with the myths that often keep us from responding and […]

Blame WordPress For the World’s Problems

Let’s call this person “wise” using air quotes to give you a description of where they come from in life. This “wise” person confronted to me at a public event to announce that WordPress was evil and must be destroyed. “After all,” he informed me soundly. “While WordPress says it supports freedom of speech, it […]

WordPress School: Copyright Policy

We’ve started our mini-series on adding policies to your WordPress site with some basic information and details on how to organize and structure policies on your site. It’s time to evaluate the five different policies featured on almost all websites regardless of topic or goals in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. Remember, we add […]

Research on the WordPress, Web Development, and Web Design Job Market

In 2012 and 2013, I did extensive research for the grant program to develop and rewrite the Web Developer degree program at Clark College. This research included an analysis of current and future job opportunities for students graduating with that degree with a solid understanding of WordPress. Now that the program has completed its first […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Copyright Violation

While I know that you would never violate anyone’s copyright and publish other people’s content without proper citation or permission, there are hundreds of thousands who think that if it is on the web, it’s free to use and abuse. Accusations of copyright violations are big deals. Some top journalists, writers, photographers, musicians, software developers, […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

How to Report Abuse to WordPress.com

By Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today NOTE:: The following article is a guide on how to report copyright issues, complaints, spam blogs, and other abuse issues to WordPress.com. Issues regarding sites using the self hosted version of WordPress require reporting directly to the site owner as they have nothing to do with WordPress nor WordPress.com. […]

How to Add MyFreeCopyright To Your WordPress Blog

404 Tech Support has just published step-by-step instructions on how to addMyFreeCopyright.com to your WordPress.com or WordPress blog. The directions are specific to WordPress.com, but will work for any blog or website. It’s also a prime example of how to use the WordPress Widget to add text to your sidebar. The code used in the […]

Weekly Digest: Catching Up, Speaking San Francisco, Future Post Mixup, Talking to Blogger Talks, and More

Yikes, it’s been a rough few weeks. Along with some nasty business stuff, which is actually normal in my line of work, I was supposed to be on my first real, non-working vacation in 14 years, which turned into a workation. What should have been normal was much less fun than usual as my husband […]

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 […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging

Blogging is wonderful. It is free spirited babbling of all types, shapes, and sizes. Unfortunately, like all positive and wonderful things, there are a negative, nasty side to blogs: Splogs. Unfortunately, because they are part of the dark side of blogging, I’ve written about them over the past year. In “Reporting Spam Blogs: Splogs”, I […]

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 […]