Dealing With Content Thieves: A Good Idea

"Hit Scrapers Where It Hurts: AdSense" gives a sensible, practical, way of dealing with people who steal your online content.

The author even gives a step-by-step how-2 for how you report content thieves to Google's Adsense. Since the crooks are almost certainly out to make money from your work, cutting off their supply of cash should be an effective way of dealing with them.

Gray Googlers and Big Bucks: Maybe

"Little Known 'Boring' Websites That Make Incredible Money With AdSense."

I'm not sure I believe this article, but it's an interesting claim.

Being within rock-throwing distance of being a "gray Googler" myself, I may be see if there's anything behind the claims.

Intellectual Property Violation: What to Do

One thing to do, anyway.

I'm following up on an earlier post. Massive amounts of content had been copied by a "blog," Pretty Paws Stylin', and posted in Pretty Paws Stylin'. After being confronted, PPS cited sources for some of its more recent posts, and sent a rather shrill email back to the content's creator.

Aside from the ethics of the, ah, creative posting strategy employed by Pretty Paws Stylin', there was the matter of advertising revenue.

The person who wrote the content that Pretty Paws Stylin' ripped off has added a comment to the discussion strong, which includes a message from AdSense, detailing a procedure for sending an official complaint about stolen content.

The AdSense procedure is at (or near, by now) the bottom of this rather long discussion.

Related posts on Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• Intellectual Property Violation: What to Do (August 15, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Violation: This Time With Laughs (August 10, 2007)
• Copyright Material Ripped Off? You're not alone. (August 9, 2007)
• Plagiarism-Finder Site: Copyscape (August 9, 2007)
• Another Abuse of Copyright: If This Isn't Illegal, it Should Be! (August 9, 2007)
• Copyright: a List You Shouldn't Myth (August 8, 2007)
• Copy, Steal, Rob, Whatever: Another Violation of Intellectual Property Rights (August 3, 2007)
• Copyright Infringement, YouTube, and Video Sharing (July 28, 2007)
• Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves (July 28, 2007)

AdSense, Shopping.com, and Eldorado

Wouldn't it be nice if we had online advertising that was pure gold?

We don't, but bloggers and other online publishers still look for something better than what they've got.

Here's a link to the blog post: " Don't settle for Google AdSense." There's a fairly lively discussion in the post's comments.

I'm sticking with AdSense for now, but there were good points brought up.

Another Abuse of Copyright: If This Isn't Illegal, it Should Be!

Yet another intellectual property rights violation.

This time, it's an attractive blog, Pretty Paws Stylin', with a picture of an adorable puppy at the top. At least, that's what was there when I visited a few minutes ago.

The blog posts are, as far as I can tell, ripped off from places on the Web that actually produce something.

I assume that profits from the AdSense advertising on "Pretty Paws Stylin' are going to the fellow who registered the URL.

Too bad there probably aren't more than a few words of original content there.

The, ah, author of this blog was caught recently, by one of the people he's ripped off, and started acknowledging the actual creators of posts. The recent ones, anyway.

As of this post, he hasn't gotten past this month. July posts are still unacknowledged.

The guy who runs "Pretty Paws Stylin'" has quite a sense of humor. At the bottom of each page he's put declaration, "Copyright © Pretty Paws."

The domain was created on May 26, 2007, according to Network Solutions' WhoIs service. The administrative and technical contacts are anonymous. The domain is registered through GoDaddy.com. In seems that Pretty Paws is run from Guadalajara, Mexico.

In order to follow GoDaddy's TOS with a comfortable margin of error, I won't give the sort of detail you can get through GoDaddy's WhoIs service, entering prettypawsstylin in their WhoIs. The link to this service is in a set of text links near the bottom of GoDaddy's home page.

Taking the creative work of someone else, posting in on your own blog, declaring it as your own copyrighted material, and making money from it: I'm no legal expert, but that sounds illegal. Unethical, at any rate.

Related posts on Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• Copyright: a List You Shouldn't Myth
• Copy, Steal, Rob, Whatever: Another Violation of Intellectual Property Rights (August 3, 2007)
• Copyright Infringement, YouTube, and Video Sharing (July 28, 2007)
• Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves (July 28, 2007)

Smart Link Exchanges: a Good Idea

Links guide us through the Web. That makes useful links quite valuable: "useful" links being those which lead to pages with content which is related to the content of the page they are placed on.

Webmasters have exchanged links for years as a way to increase traffic to their websites, putting a link to another site on one or more of their pages in exchange for a link or links put on the receiving site. Link exchanges work for bloggers, too.

Smart link exchanges, that is. To be useful for boosting traffic in the long run, the links at each end must lead viewers to something the viewer will find useful or interesting.

A pretty good example of link exchange is in this post: "Hin's Photo Blog, Digital capture of special memory," a blog maintained by my friend from BlogCatalog, Hin Man.

He recently topped $100 in earnings from his advertising partnership. I'll let him give the details, in AdSense $100 Movement. It's interesting from both the business and family point of view.

If "Hin" sounds familiar, it should. I discussed another of his blogs on August 2, 2007, in Blogging How-2: an Entry-Level Resource Blog.

I decided to link to Hin's pages again because he's a good friend of mine from an online community, and, more importantly, because our exchange of links is a good example of how link exchanges work.

I think our exchange of links makes sense, because the links are on-topic for both sites. Hin's AdSense $100 Movement uses a link to this blog as an example of his "AdSense $100 Movement" of people who are trying to legitimately optimize their AdSense performance. My links to his pages are on-topic, since they are examples of smart link exchange.

That's smart link exchange.

Not-So-Smart link exchange is when pages with no common ground exchange links. Since I enjoy thinking of ludicrous examples, a list follows. Serious readers are encouraged to stop reading here. Only nonsense will be found in the rest of this post.

Really Dumb (and fictional) Link Exchanges:

• Contemplation Aspects of Needlepoint with Beer Guzzler's Daily Belch
• Pink Bubble Gum with Emancipation of the Dissonance as Used in 12-Tone Compositions
• Northern Minnesota Wine Taster with Dirt Bike Demon
• Head-Bangers RoOl with Simple DIY

Blogging How-2: an Entry-Level Resource Blog

This looks pretty good, with a step-by-step of how one of the blogger's online photos was processed.

" Hin's Tech Corner: about digital photography, internet, software, blog, advertising and journey into dSL." One of this blog's posts is Man 2 Man about AdSense, a strictly personal look at the blogger's response to reaching the $100 mark in AdSense revenue.

A pretty good look at Picasa, dpreview, Statcounter, and more. Probably best for bloggers who don't have the time or interest to devote to in-depth, professional-level discussions of these subjects.

Check it out, let me know what you think!

A Blog Without Focus is a Blog Without Purpose, Sometimes

Back on July 22, I wrote that this blog "will be my blog on other blogs."

It didn't take me very long to lose my focus. I started making Apathetic Lemming of the North a repository of links and micro-reviews of Web pages I found interesting. Fun, but not what I had in mind.

More to the point, the re-purposed blog would probably be of interest to very few people, other than myself.

If a blog's author has no purpose other that self-gratification, picking a topic and sticking with it aren't important. The blog's only intended reader is the author, and the author presumably won't willingly spend time writing about anything the readery won't find interesting.

For all other blog authors, it pays to keep the reader in mind. At some point I'll probably harangue about spelling and syntax as aspects of readability. Now, I'll focus on - focus.

Three Reasons to Stay on Topic

• Attract readers
  Search engines 'like' contentually consistent pages
• Display relevant ads
  Contextually sensitive advertising services, like AdSense, choose ads based on what's found on the page
• Bring readers back
  You're more likely to return to a blog that's rich in relevant content, so are your readers

Readers are like prospectors. They remember where they found rich collections of content, just as prospectors remember where they found rich deposits of gold.

I'll try to take my own advice, get back on track, and stay there.

Google’s contextual advertising may lead to heart attack

This blog post's lead sentence is, "Ok so maybe that headline is a bit dramatic, but just take a close look at this screen capture of Yahoo! News."

The rest is a well-written description of how Google AdSense works, and how the author believes it relates to a relevant topic: health care. Apparently, we've got so much advertising online, that "most of America can’t make sound health care decisions on their own."

I may be wrong, but this reminds me of the way Gregory Bresiger paraphrased a letter from his congressman, explaining why the congressman voted against a tax cut. In part, the paraphrase said, "Besides, you wouldn’t know what to do with your own money. You’d just waste it!

"I'm one of those commoners who think that common sense is much more common than our betters believe.Still, Street Anatomy's post is well-written, and raises an interesting point.

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