When I first started freelancing on the Internet I wanted to learn all I could so I decided to read a few articles I found about my new chosen profession. One in particular told me that although there were many benefits to freelancing like setting your own hours and being your own boss, one of the big downfalls was having to be constantly looking for work because contracts and clients change frequently.

So far, I’m glad that I’ve never really run into trouble even though I ignored that kind of advice at first and had a few big contracts tank over the years through no fault of my own. Still, I’ve been able to get some experience from even those periods when I’ve had to look for work quickly and some of the lessons that I learned include,

• The fact that some clients don’t fully understand search engine optimization.  I’ve run into a few people over the years that think seo is a magic bullet that works as quickly as you can switch on your computer but that’s not the case. A good campaign that involves both blogs and articles will take a few months to get rolling. It’s much the same as any print campaign but some companies still think they can force the issue with the search engines somehow. It’s good to let clients know what to expect right away.
• The fact that as a writer you need to shift gears. When you’re copywriting for a client on the Internet it’s important to remember that even though the content is what will hold the reader and convert them into a sale, it’s the seo that gets them to the site. As a content writer, I’m  always trying keep in mind that it’s important to juggle those two balls.

So the advice I was given by the article I read those years ago said that part of the freelancer’s life is constantly making sure you have enough work. There have been several times I ignored that important piece of advice and when I had enough for the moment I neglected to keep my feelers out there.

The result was a few situations where I had to scramble early on and that taught me a few things about promoting myself. One of the first things I learned was the art of Internet networking. The links are always the Holy Grail and when you can get them in the right places like niche forms and on the websites of colleagues you’ll always have some momentum even when you’re not looking for work.

It only takes a few minutes a day to update a Twitter or Facebook account as well and there are quite often groups that you can join there that pertain to your field. By the way, a great way to keep expanding is to always be on the look out for new business opportunities as well. I’ve just started an enterprise with Terry McElligott,  a Toronto based web designer called Bluestripe.ca

Looking For Work Should Be Ongoing


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

A single bottle, “a suave rendition of Pinot Noir produced from top-flight California vineyards,” will cost you 20 $ while a case (12 bottles) costs 240 $ (you also have the option to donate more). This Twitter initiative was announced in October 2009. You can read about an event related to it on the Twitter blog.

“Every case sold will provide approximately 60 local language children’s books and promote education in the world’s poorest regions,” says the Fledgling Initiative website. So go ahead and buy a bottle/case of the finest wine and help the education of poor children in some of the most deprived regions of the world.

You can also follow the Fledgling Initiative on Twitter; it has about 0.3 million followers and appears in about 760 lists. Who bought the bottle of the said wine and when? It was a guy from Brooklyn on 15 October 2009.

The following image is of Twitter staff Maggie Mutgoff at a Room to Read site in India.

Twitter Sells Wine to Promote Literacy


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

I’d noticed that it was taking a little bit longer to access my blog. I had also noticed that my weekly WebCEO report showed that my site was woefully slow. I had a look in my Wordpress dashboard and decided I needed more help, so I opened a support ticket with my host – Bluehost.

My host then said: “I see that your website is using too much in CPU resources for our shared hosting environment.” I was shocked. My site is hardly Problogger or Mashable. It’s just a writing blog with a decent, though not exorbitant, amount of traffic. So what had changed? The Bluehost tech support guys talked me through some of the options.

Reducing CPU Load

1. The first suggestions was to reduce running processes which I should have been able to find in Cpanel via a button under the CPU throttling section. I opened it and found nothing running. Zero. Zilch.

2. The next suggestion was to disable plug-ins in WordPress. I’d already done that some time back and had pared down to the essentials, but I logged into my dashboard and checked that I didn’t have anything particularly intensive enabled. I disabled a couple I had recently installed just in case. Everything was up to date, too, which removed another possible flag.

3. The next step was to check for slow mySQL queries. Here are the instructions Bluehost provided:

Log into your cpanel.

# Click on phpMyAdmin.

# On the left will be a list of your databases. Select the one you want to repair/optimize.

# This will load all of the tables in your database into the right side. At the bottom of this list, there is a link called “Check All”. Click that.

# Just to the right of the check all link there is a drop down menu that says “With Selected.” Click on that, and choose “repair”.

# You should get a page that will list all the tables, with “OK” listed next to them. When this is done, look up to the top of the page, and click on the “Structure” tab.

# This will take you back to the page you saw on step 4.

# Click “Check All” again, and then choose “Optimize” in the drop down menu.

I completed that and checked back next day to see what difference it had made. It had reduced the amount of throttling but my site was still being slowed down for nearly 3 hours in every 24 – not good enough.

Other Options

As it turned out, I’d exhausted the tech support options and Bluehost suggested that either I get professional help or get a VPS or dedicated hosting from another host. With more than a year to run on my current hosting contract, I’m not ready to do that yet, so I did some more digging around and found that someone else had experienced the same problem.

Finding Help

CravingTech’s post on his problems told me that I needed to look and see if my theme could be the problem. Perhaps — the thumbnail script and JQuery as well certain images are responsible for many of the excessive hits. I also read the follow-up post where he talked about his move to HostGator and the one about reducing Wordpress CPU usage, which provide some useful starting points for cutting CPU load.

Where does that leave me? Since I’m not going to change hosting just yet, I need to see if the problem lies within the theme – or somewhere else. In the meantime, my site is still being throttled. Have you experienced a similar problem with shared hosting? How did you solve it?

(Photo: San Diego Shooter)

Is Your Web Host Throttling Your Blog?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

In my (9-5 job) industry, Medical Software, there is a huge focus on the concept of Interoperability. Interoperability is the ability to have diverse systems talk to each other and work together. The main reason why interoperability is being talked about like crazy is that the government has approved a stimulus package for the health care system. Hospitals need to get on board with an electronic health record in order to get the money that is available. The problem is that each hospital across the country has a different software system and those systems don’t talk to each other without interfaces to make the disparate systems inter operate.

Being in this industry I can see where the problems occurred. Medical software is so specialized and very competitive. For years these software companies have not worked together in any way. The platforms have all been built independently with no common ground. Also, because the software is specialized it is really expensive and it is hard for hospitals to make changes to their systems. Basically the health care industry has some major trouble ahead until the disparate systems work together. Even Windows and Mac can work together pretty well while still selling their systems. Sure there is competition but being able to work together only makes these systems stronger and we as consumers benefit. Maybe the medical software community will take a lesson here and work together to actually benefit the consumer.

What’s the point?

Okay, so that was a really long opening to talk to about what interoperability might mean for your blog. When I think of interoperability for blogging I go straight to what Chris Brogan has termed “Giving Your Ideas ‘Handles’“. Collaboration with other people is a great way for you as a blogger to grow. You might think that you need to keep all your best work on your own blog, but if no one is reading your blog then they won’t see and read that great work of yours. Finding ways to give your ideas away can help draw a larger audience to those ideas.

Are your blogs open to the prospect of working together with other bloggers?

In my years of blogging I have worked with so many other bloggers I can’t even count the number. I’m very open to working with other bloggers all the time. I look for ways to collaborate, either with guest posts, interviews or appearing on podcasts. The one thing that I don’t have right now on my blog is a “Collaborate with me” page on my blog. That is something I could set up with links to where I’ve done guest posts, guest appearances on podcasts and other collaborative ventures. I will correct that very soon.

Do you have a system in place to let others submit guest blog posts?

Building on the ‘collaborate with me’ page; a section all about Guest Posting would also be very useful. My friend Jim Kukral asked one time for guest bloggers. He got a pretty good response and some fantastic posts, content and connections from that asking. The one thing I would suggest is that if you are hosting guest bloggers it would be beneficial to both parties to give them additional value in exchange for the post. Have an easy way for the guest bloggers to submit a photo of themselves and add a couple of links to the blogger’s blog like this site does. So, when you are thinking of opening the floodgates to guest posting make sure you work in how can you make guest posting for you more beneficial to the guest blogger.

Do you have a page up that shows that you are available to do guest posts for other blogs?

When you are looking to do guest posts on other blogs remember a few key things.

• Learn about the host blogger’s audience
• Write your best stuff, hold nothing back
• Link to other bloggers who have relevant content and also ones that you’d like to guest post for as well.
• Do not link back to your own blog except for the links that the host will provide, you are not there to sell your own stuff.

When you set up your page about being open to guest blogging make sure that you link out to those guest posts that you have already written. If you haven’t written any guest posts yet make sure that you write up a page about yourself that highlights your strengths and what you can bring to the hosts blog. Link to examples of your best posts as examples, too.

How do you define giving your ideas ‘handles’?

For the most part I think that interoperability and “give your ideas ‘handles’” are mostly buzzwords until you actually put them into practice. So, can you tell me how you can find ways to create interoperability for your blog and give your own ideas ‘handles’?

Interoperability – Can it Work for your Blog?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

LASTPASS

Put simply, you need a tool that will manage your passwords among other things. LastPass does just that. What is more, it is free (read priceless).

LastPass can do so much for you. The following is an indicative (not exhaustive) list of things that it can do for you and aid your online life, online business and blogging:

• You don’t have to remember or note innumerable passwords. Just remember one master password to access the LastPass vault and the rest is professionally taken care of by LastPass. Your sensitive data is encrypted and only your master password can unlock it.
• Generate secure passwords; choose tough combinations from numbers, letters, special characters.
• You can set up multiple profiles and do automated filling of web forms on various websites. Get one click login to your favourite sites.
• It is easy to use, safer, multi-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux), free and secure. The LastPass premium version (for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows mobile etc.) costs only 1 $ per month.
• Among other things, you can save and sync passwords between your browsers, easily import and export data (from and to other password managers), safely share logins with friends, screen keyboards and one time passwords (to protect you from key loggers), identify weak passwords (“bulletproof your online life” with the LastPass comprehensive analysis of your passwords) and stay secure the LastPass phising protection.
• It is a must-have Firefox extension. “Awesome tool, life saver,” says a review of LastPass. Use it to know why everybody  who uses it loves it.

LastPass is the 46th item in the PCWorld’s 100 best products of 2009. It has also been applauded by Lifehacker, ZDNet, PC Mag editors, the Economist, CNET and other reputed entities. Your can see the complete set of support screencasts on their website before embracing it to get an idea of the utility. You can also follow the LastPass blog for updates on LastPass and passwords scams and issues on the internet.

Embrace LastPass for peace of mind!

Use LastPass for password management and peace of mind


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The idea comes from Tim Maly who makes the compelling case that combining all of your content into one feed is disruptive to yourself, your friends and your readers. One of the major reasons is that it results in your content being duplicated all over the Web as search engines pick up both your source content and the feeds that you tell to pull from the sources (IE: Friendfeed).

However, there is another kind of RSS feed copying that is getting a great deal of attention and that’s the kind of copying that happens without permission. It’s the kind of RSS use, also known as scraping, that gives rise to spam blogs and other garbage sites, as well as other, more legitimate services.

So how do you prevent your feeds from being copied while still encouraging users to subscribe to your work and allow other legitimate works? There are many different approaches but here are four that you can take advantage of today, literally in the time it takes to read this post.

The Basics

From a content creator standpoint, RSS feeds are a mixed blessing. On one hand, they allow readers to subscribe to your site and get your updates delivered to them, on the downside, since they are essentially raw versions of your content with predictable formatting, it is like handing over your content on a silver platter to those who wish to use it for more nefarious reasons.

In short, whatever you put into an RSS feed, someone can trivially extract the content and place it on another site. Since all RSS feeds are formatted the same way, there’s no need for human involvement as one script can literally parse millions of feeds. This is how spammers fill up thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of spam blogs in a few a hours.

So, if you have an RSS feed for your blog, or anywhere else for that matter, it is worth taking a moment to figure out what you can do to reduce this kind of unwanted copying or at least minimize its negative impact.

With that in mind, here are four tips to help you keep your RSS feeds safe(r).

1. Use a Feed Footer

Feed footers may not prevent others from scraping your feed, but it ensures that your content is always identified wherever it appears and links back to you. A good footer should contain a link back to your copyright information (copyright symbol, year, name, site name, etc.) and a link back to your site. Don’t put warnings in the footer as it may confuse legitimate readers who are viewing the content on Google Reader or elsewhere.

There are many different WordPress plugins that can do this, including Ozh’s Better Feed Plugin, or you can simply edit your RSS files. Blogspot has a setting for feed signature that you can use to add the HTML you want.

2. Use a Digital Fingerprint

While you are working on your feed footer, take the opportunity to add a digital fingerprint to your content.

A digital fingerprint is a short but unique series of letters and numbers that defines your content (EX: “a1b2c3d4″). Ideally, if you search Google for it, no results should come up. That way, all matches for it almost certainly pertain to you scraped copies of your work.

Once you’ve done that, set up a Google Alert for your digital fingerprint and be emailed every time scraped versions of your content appear on the Web. From there, you can easily shut down most infringing sites by contacting their host.

3. Use .htaccess

Though a bit more technical in nature, if you operate your own domain and have access to your .htaccess file, you can use it to block sites that are scraping your feed.

This only works if you are self-hosted and aren’t using a third party service, such as FeedBurner, to handle your feed subscriptions. Also, you have to use a site like Domain Tools, to determine the IP address of the server. Once you do that, you can then block it from accessing your server.

However, be careful with this one, you don’t want to accidentally block legitimate readers from accessing your feed or your site.

4. Limit What is In Your Feed

It is important to remember that anything that is not in your feed can’t be scraped by most spammers. As such, if you don’t put something in your feed, it is much safer than the content that is.

On that front, consider truncating your feed. Though partial feeds are very unpopular with readers, which is why I am loathe to recommend them, it may be a good solution for sites without a lot of RSS subscribers.

Also, you may wish to look at removing images from your RSS feed Typically, spam sites not only pick those up, but hotlink them from your server. This can create a real problem for you as you are paying the bandwidth to host content on their sites. Worse still, traditional tools, such as referrer checking, causes images to break in your RSS feed as people access it via Web-based readers.

In short, if you don’t want something scraped, don’t put it in your feed.

Bottom Line

In the end, RSS feeds do bloggers far more good than they do harm. For every scraper or spammer, there are likely dozens, if not more, legitimate readers. It is much better to deal with the cases of infringement that do come up than it is to shut down an avenue to your content that many legitimate readers likely enjoy.

That being said, it doesn’t mean you should offer your content up on a silver platter with no strings attached. You can easily monitor/track content placed into your RSS feed and then either shut down or block those that choose to misuse your content.

While there’s no “one size fits all” solution to these issues, there is little doubt that there are tools available to you that you can use to protect your content while also giving to those who want it.

4 Tips to Keep Your Feeds Safe(r) from Copying


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

This is contrary to the way many of us choose to operate. When I started blogging the best advice was to spread your feed around and have it appear absolutely everywhere. When lifestreaming services started appearing it was a simple matter to import my blog feed to make another location where people could keep up with my content.

Why Link Your Feeds?

There are several advantages to doing this:

• you make your content available in the location where people are
• you increase the number of mentions you get online
• as a result you might boost your social karma (if that’s important to you)

Why Linking Feeds May Be Bad

There’s no denying that a search for my name will bring up several of the social media sites where I have a presence and that’s not all bad. At the same time there are several disadvantages of having everything appear everywhere.

• your content is duplicated all over the web
• you are boring your friends and followers, particularly if they follow you in more than one location
• you are adding to the information overload (without adding anything new or useful)

I was particularly struck by the part of Tim’s manifesto that posited a better way.

He points out that each social network is different and therefore you should interact differently on each of them. His statement has a ring of truth. While my audience intersects there are some people who only appear on a single network and I have to admit that some of those people probably get short-changed. I can just about keep my head above water with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – any more would require more time than I have, so I may not interact as much with those who befriend me on some of the less active networks.

Living The Manifesto?

Perhaps that’s one reason why Tim’s manifesto struck a chord with me. The other is that I have been trying to reduce duplication on my social media accounts for the last few weeks. I have reduced the number of sources going in to Friendfeed and pared down my Facebook stream. And on my new Tumblr account I have gone one better and decided not to import any existing sources at all but to save it for something I am not posting anywhere else.

Have you read this manifesto? How do you feel about it? Has it changed the way you treat your feeds?

Should You Really Unlink Your Feeds?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

This post was inspired by Revision3’s ROFL podcast. I’ve been on the road all day and I had a ton of episodes of ROFL, which is a standup comedy show. I’ve always been a fan of standup and other forms of comedy but standup is my favorite form. So, I got to thinking of how blogging can be compared to standup comedy.

Good Standup Requires Exceptional Timing

Timing is one of the things that is so crucial to good comedy. When a comedian starts their set you can tell whether or not their timing is off. They set up the joke wait a beat and nail the punchline. Bloggers, you can pace the timing of your content with examples and bullet points. Then you can nail the points home with great wrap up statements and engaging questions. Is your timing on or off?

Good Standup asks Questions

A comedian sets up some of their bits by asking questions. By asking questions comedians can get the audience engaged in what they are talking about. Capturing the audience is crucial for good standup. Bloggers, asking questions of your audience changes them from passive to active participants. Responding to the audience’s reaction also continues the exchange and strengthens the experience. Are you asking enough questions when you blog?

Good Standup uses Callbacks

As you are listening to a comedian perform you might hear them refer back to a joke that they told earlier in the set. This works great because the comedian calls back to a shared experience. Because the experience is shared from an earlier joke the audience is already in on the joke. For bloggers you can refer back to your previous posts and physically link to them as well. That way you can bring the audience into the conversation and give them those callbacks to build upon the shared experience. Are calling back to your previous work and letting your community in on the joke?

Good Standup Jokes tap into Public Opinion

Comedians can get the crowd on their side by pointing out something that we all have experience with. By appealing to the court of public opinion the comedian can tap into that collective experience and knowledge that we already share, that way they can get to the joke without having to set it up as extensively. Bloggers, when we write up some of our posts do we tap into something that is happening online already? Sharing your opinion on a post from Copyblogger, or Problogger or Chris Brogan is one way to tap into that collective. Or writing about tools that we all use like Twitter, Flickr and Wordpress you also tap into that court of public opinion. When you elaborate on public opinion and talk about your experiences as part of the collective community you can cut right to the important part of your message.

Good Standup Makes you Think

Sometimes Comedians will tell a joke and it hits you later. That delayed laughter sometimes is the best kind because it means that you got that special take away from the show. That is the joke you will tell your friends because it made you think. Bloggers, when we write are we writing to make our readers think? Are we engaging them so that they become part of our communities or are we simply entertaining them so they can move on to the next blog?

Good Blogging is like Good Standup


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The header design (“giant banner”, “surrealist design” according to some comments) is engrossing (see the snapshot below). Among other things, it has a saxophone. Matt, for the uninitiated, was a student at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (Houston) where he studied Jazz and saxophone. The header image is a very doodled one and makes you think for some time. ‘Unlucky in cards’ was also Matt’s tagline on his previous blog design. You can also leave a comment on the intriguing header.

The footer of the blog also has some humour. The copyright years are dated 1984-2010!  Matt’s date of birth is 11 January 1984, hence 1984 to 2010! Among other things the blog is powered by ‘ramen noodles and love’! See the snapshot below.

Matt’s childhood photo on the about page (see pic below) in the about page is also eye-catching.

It is a personal blog indeed as Matt himself admits and Matt is not very worried about the loading time, widescreen suitability or for that matter the hyperlinks and text being in the same color. The blog runs on WordPress 3.0-alpha (a version usually tested by the developers).

The Contact page will also succeed in making you smile. The contact details on this page are very interesting. You can contact Matt by land (email), by sea (AIM) or by air (cell phone). Matt also says, “Other forms of communication, including psychic signals and carrier pigeons seem to be less reliable, so stick to the above methods just to be safe.”

The unconventional domain name ma.tt is a domain hack (tt is Trinidad and Tobago registry)! Read more about domain hack on Wikipedia.

By the way, Matt has another personal blog Matt on Not-WordPress on WordPress.com where he posts things from his iPhone, “ruminates” on some WordPress topics and plays with WordPress.com features. You can also see mullenweg.com (Mullenweg-related genealogical information).

Here is a concluding snapshot. This is Google query suggestions on Matt Mullenweg captured on February 13, 2010! People  are searching ‘Matt Mullenweg girlfriend’, ‘Matt Mullenweg net worth’, ‘Matt Mullenweg net worth’ and ‘Matt Mullenweg bank’ among other things.

Matt Mullenweg’s Blog Makes You Smile


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Though most bloggers are aware of Creative Commons Licenses and know they can search for CC images on Flickr. Others are well aware of the StockXchng as a good free stock photo library as well as sites like Articlesbase for free posts for your site. But these are far from the only means of finding free content for your blog.

There are many different sources for Creative Commons, public domain and appropriately-licensed material if you know where to look. With that in mind, here are five examples of sites you can find free stuff for your blog that are a bit off the beaten path.

1. Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons hosts many of the image, audio and movie files that are found in Wikipedia and related projects. All of the content in Wikimedia Commons is available under either a CC-BY-SA license, the GNU Free Documentation License or is in the public domain.

What makes this site so useful is how easy it is to search for relevant media types and the very wide breadth of content that is available.

If you’re looking for a photo or audio file that is more “news” than it is “stock” you’ll likely find what you need in this library, especially if you are covering something that isn’t extremely recent.

2. Google

Though we are almost all familiar with Google, what is less know is that it can also be a great tool for finding free, legal content for your site.

By using the advanced search feature, linked above, you can easily filter your search by content types available for certain kinds of reuse.

Google Image Search has a similar feature, though it doesn’t seem to work as well.

3. The U.S. Federal Government

Works created by the U.S. Government are automatically placed into the public domain. This means images from NASA, reports from various agencies and even whole publications are available for you to use freely.

However, with U.S. Federal works you have to be careful. For one, works created by state governments are still copyright protected. Second, some of the works posted on official sites are actually created and owned by others.

In short, be sure that the work was created by the Federal government before using it.

4. The Internet Archive

Though the Internet Archive is well-known for its Wayback Machine that lets you see how pages were at various points in their history, it also has an extremely large library of content available for reuse including video, audio and texts.

All of the content in The Internet Archive’s library has either been uploaded by creators and licensed for reuse or is in the public domain. However, you do need to be careful to read the licensing terms for each work carefully.

Textually, the group focuses heavily on digitized copies of old books, which may limit its usefulness for this purpose, but the range of audio is surprising.

5. Blip.Tv

If you are just looking for video to embed into a blog post, virtually any video site can help. The vast majority of videos available on such sites can be embedded elsewhere.

However, if you’re looking for video content to remix and integrate into your own work, Blip.tv can help. The site has a very robust Creative Commons search and lets you download the raw video of relevant files.

In short, it is trivial to find the content you want, download the original and start editing.

Bottom Line

In all of the cases above, as with whenever you use someone else’s work, you should be very careful to follow the licenses to the letter and ensure that you complete the terms put before you. It only takes a few minutes and can prevent some serious headaches.

With that in mind though, these sites can be great resources for finding free, legal content for your site that aren’t from the same sources everyone else is using. This will help make your content a bit more unique and the end product a bit more your own.

Though original content is always best, you never want to simply rehash what others have done before you. So sometimes it pays to stray a bit into unfamiliar territory and see what you can find.

5 Lesser-Known Sources for Free, Legal Content


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Get some help

One of the best ways to keep your blog going while you regain your focus is to get guest bloggers. It’s a good time to invite your readers to make their contribution to your blog. You’ve got a couple of options here: you could issue an open invitation or you could contact a few bloggers who have left thoughtful or useful comments and ask them to write something for the blog. If your blog is making lots of money, then consider hiring someone to help you. It’s important to choose the right person — someone who knows the blog, knows the readers, has something to say and isn’t the same slump that you’re in.

Change of scene

Once you’ve taken care of that, it’s time to broaden your horizons. Perhaps the people who are guest posting on your blog would like you to guest post on theirs. There is nothing like writing for a new audience to get the creative juices flowing. Trying to appeal to someone else by writing something that is different from your regular content can help you to rediscover what you loved about blogging in the first place.

Take a break

If blogging for others doesn’t do it for you then maybe it’s time to take a complete break. Schedule some posts and guest posts and then go offline for a while. Read papers and books, watch television, visit family — do anything but blog. Keep a notebook handy to jot down any ideas that come to you — it’s funny how they do when you’re trying not to think about your blog.

Start over

Sometimes you have to face the fact that you will never be interested in the topic again. Perhaps the blog grew up out of a particular interest which you have now left behind or perhaps you really have said everything you want to say about it. That might not be true for everyone else. Consider starting a new blog on the passion that drives you now. As for your old blog, you’ve got lots of choices — you can leave it on the web as a resource for others or sell it on to someone who’s got ideas about how to develop it.

Taking my own advice

I’ve got a bunch of old blogs littering the web (and in some cases I mean that literally). I’ve got a couple of blogs that are about four years old on sites that I outgrew when I started blogs on their own domains. I’ve got a couple of Blogger blogs — at least one of which I might go back to one day. On my writing blog, I took my own advice and asked someone whose skill I respected to become a regular contributor. And I’ve also started a new blog on a topic that I’m excited about. What have you done to get your mojo back as a blogger?

How To Get Your Blogging Mojo Back


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

In the spring, it rains a lot but it usually doesn’t flood.
And in the winter, it snows, but we’re not snowed in.

That is, until the snows started about two weeks ago. The first night, it was kind of fun. It was a Friday night, so we all holed in with our beers, our movies and plenty of milk, bread and toilet paper to keep any families happy.

One foot of snow later, thousands of us were sitting in the dark. The rest of us didn’t have cable television that worked. We’re not hardy people here in Ohio, and we’ve got short attention spans. It doesn’t take long before we start getting bored — usually about a half hour after the lights go out, in fact. But that’s usually okay, because, again, we don’t have extreme weather patterns here. A weekend snow is plowed away by Monday, and life goes on as usual.Yeah, right.
It has not stopped snowing here in more than two weeks. The kids have only gone to school one day. I have two 100-pound Labs that normally love playing in the snow.
It’s up to their chests now. The thrill is gone.
Our parking lots have snow mountains in them. We actually had someone get in trouble with the law a couple of days ago for smacking someone with a snow shovel who had dared to take his dug-out on-street parking space.
And the fun goes on.
The latest Facebook rumor going on amongst my contacts and friends is that there is a mammoth snowstorm coming. The biggest snow in years! We’re getting 40 inches of snow in one night! Fifty inches! It won’t all melt until JULY, for heaven’s sake!
So being the kind of geeky computer blogging person I am, I decided that enough was enough of the rumors. I decided to go on an Internet search and find some of the more creative ways other people around the country are passing their snowbound days.
And now in addition to being bored, I’m impressed and intimidated by the sites and articles I’ve found. You folks have some great ways of passing your snowed-in days.
So here’s some funnies I’ve found so far:

http://www.snowpanic.com/ This blog’s owners say they’ve been tracking the  “Snowpocalypse” since 2009, and freely invite visitors to send in some of the best examples of panic and dismay brought about because of the ongoing snow falls. There’s photos of bread aisles where the bread’s all been sold, tales of neighborhood people threatening plow drivers with bodily harm, and many more all-too-funny examples of the ways these snow storms are causing panic in even the more seasoned weather watchers. Pretty funny stuff!

http://vondrook.com OK, I love a good zombie movie. So when I came across this very creative snow post, “In Preparation of Snowstorm, Citizens Go Out for Eggs, Cannibalism,” I naturally had to stop to enjoy it.  After all, how can you pass up an article that starts out “As a major winter storm was heading towards the east coast, citizens ventured to their nearest grocery stores in hopes of stocking up on foodstuffs, which typically turned into violent bloodshed and cannibalism … The lines were long, sure, but at least everyone was patient; that is, until, the Weather Service declared a ‘Winter Storm Watch.’ After that, it was every man, woman, and child for themselves.” Very funny stuff! And so descriptive of the lines I see at the local grocery store every time the forecasters get too excited.

And if you think you’re safe from ridicule, you’re not, as long as so many people have cell phones with cameras on them. Don’t believe me? Check out this slice of life photograph of snow panic at the grocery store.

What’s really great about all these blogs and bloggers? They’ve taken what the rest of us only sit around and complain about, and made something entertaining out of it.  Those blogs might not make their owners a lot of money, but they are entertaining, they get lots of traffic, and best of all, they’re good examples of what blogging is really all about — using the Internet to communicate the goings-on of the day.

Seen any good winter blogs lately? We’d love to hear about them!

Oh, God, It’s Snowing Again!


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The following snapshots are taken from various reputed blogs and websites. The copyright year(s) in all of them are outdated. The aim of publishing this is fun and humour and not sarcasm. All snapshots were taken on 12 February 11 AM IST.

Google blogs do not update copyright year(s) in the footer. The main Google sites however have the latest update but not the blogs.

The official Google blog is dated 2009

The Gmail blog is dated 2008

The Google Chrome blog says 2009

The Google student blog is dated 2008

The Google Analytics blog is dated 2009

The Google Website Optimizer blog is dated2008

Gator Crossing, the HostGator blog is dated 2009.

The Twitter blog is dated 2009

The Softlayer blog is dated 2008

Who is hosting this dot com (both the homepage and blog) is dated 2007-2009

Snapshots:10 Popular Blogs that have not updated the Copyright notice year(s)


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Not only are you constantly creating new copyrighted works while making your blog but, most likely, you are integrating other’s works into your site including your blogging application (IE: WordPress), your theme, images with your posts, quotes, etc.

However, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding on matters of copyright. Some of it is because the law is genuinely confusing, some of it is caused by misinformation that is being spread around the Web and much of it is the simple fact that most bloggers aren’t interested in these issues.

Unfortunately, those who are ignorant about the law often step into traps while wading through it and these pitfalls can both limit your rights to control your own work and cause you to be threatened or sued by others.

As a blogger, it is best to have at least some knowledge of copyright so you can protect yourself. With that in mind, here are five copyright facts every blogger should know.

1. If It’s Saved, It’s Copyrighted

There is no requirement to place a notice on your work for it to be considered copyrighted nor do you have to register your work with any third party. A creative work is considered copyrighted the moment it is “fixed in any tangible medium of expression“. Once you save your work to your hard drive (or server), doodle a sketch onto a napkin or put that painting on canvas, it is copyrighted.

Though you can’t copyright ideas, just their expression, and you do need to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office if you are U.S. citizen and wish to be able to sue for copyright infringement and collect all potential damages. However, that has nothing to do with your rights in the work and your ability to demand removal of infringing copies.

On the counter side, unless you have some significant reason to believe otherwise, assume all works you encounter on the Web are copyrighted and threat them as such.

2. There is No Golden Rule for Fair Use

Though others like to talk about rules such as X number of words in a blog post or X number of seconds in a song, there is no magic “bright line” on matters of fair use.

In short, fair use is a defense against a copyright infringement lawsuit and it is determined on a case-by-case basis, not by any hard rules. Judges and juries weigh four factors when looking at fair use and those factors get weighed differently almost every time.

There are some uses that are clearly fair and others that are clearly not. In between there is a wide swatch of gray area that could, quite literally, go either way.

3. Attribution is No Substitute for Permission

Though attribution is a good thing to give, it doesn’t give a green light to use a work as you see fit.

Attributing a work simply prevents its use from being a plagiarism. However, plagiarism and copyright infringement are two separate ideas. Not all cases of plagiarism are infringements and not all infringements are plagiarism.

If you want to use someone’s work on your site, get permission to do so. You can do this either by asking the person directly or looking for works licensed under Creative Commons licenses and then completing the terms of the license.

Failure to get permission to use a work can result in a cease and desist letter, takedown notice being filed or, in extreme cases, a lawsuit. On the flip side, don’t assume just because others attribute your work that it isn’t infringing. If you don’t want your work used in that capacity, you have the right to stop it.

4. You Can’t Copyright Names or Ideas

Though you can copyright a wide variety of content including literary works, photographs, paintings, movies, sound recordings and even hull designs, you can not copyright a name or an idea.

Names fall under the realm of trademark law, which deals with names and marks used in business. Trademark is much more limited in scope of protection than copyright for many reasons but the crux of it is that it is designed to prevent confusion in the marketplace. Delta Airlines and Delta Faucets, for example, can have the same name because they are in two different markets.

Ideas fall under patent law. Patents must be applied for and approved through a lengthy and expensive process and not all ideas are patentable.

For more information on trademarks and patents, visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

5. Changing a Few Words Does Not Create a New Work

Finally, just because the copying isn’t verbatim does not mean that it isn’t an infringement. Copyright is not just a right to copy a work, but rather a set of exclusive rights including the right to make derivative works. A derivative work is a new work based upon the original and can include not only works with minor changes, such as moving a few words around, but also more substantial changes such as sequels and spin offs.

Though determining whether a work is a derivative work or not is a gray area problem similar to fair use, the test is whether an “ordinary observer” would notice that the new work is based on the original. Changing a few words or names around certainly fails that test.

Always remember that, just because a work is not identical to the original does not mean it is not an infringement.

Bottom Line

This is, of course, just a basic overview of some of the most important pieces of information bloggers need to know when it comes to copyright. I tried to focus on areas where there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation but, clearly, there is a lot more ground to cover.

The bottom line though is that, if you are a blogger, you owe it to yourself to have an understanding of how copyright works both so you can enforce your rights and you can avoid troubles of your own down the road.

You don’t have to be an expert on copyright, but it helps to at least understand the basics and how it can affect you.

5 Copyright Facts Every Blogger Should Know


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Criticisms Of Buzz

There are some things that Buzz doesn’t do nearly as well as the other social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Considering that Buzz is embedded in Gmail, which has awesome filtering capabilities, the absence of similar capacity in Buzz is odd. I’d like to be able to filter my friends stream easily or divide them into lists to I can see the particular set of updates I’m interested in. That’s somewhere where Facebook and Friendfeed have the upper hand.

Buzz is also incredibly noisy if you are following people like Richard Scoble, Darren Rowse, Mashable or Louis Gray. Since it shows you the posts with the most activity, you almost always see these at the top of your Buzz stream, while other, more recent posts might be lost. That makes Buzz almost useless for me, as I want to know what’s happening with all the people I am following, not just the most popular. I ended up unfollowing those people so I could see what was happening with the rest. Surely that negates the point of Buzz?

I also find it irritating that I can only see a few updates within a window, when I’d like to see more links and to be able to choose whether to see the comments or not. Fewer defaults, more choice – that’s what Buzz needs. Having said that, there are things I like about it.

Kudos For Buzz

I love being able to read a post inline and comment without leaving Buzz. I’ve commented on posts that I might have previously read and tweeted but otherwise ignored. That’s good news for bloggers who Buzz. I’ve found that people have done the same on some of my posts. These are people who might get my posts by email but might never bother to comment, so the increased interaction is a major plus.

Even better, I’ve been able to have conversations on Buzz with people I don’t normally speak to, not because I don’t want to, but because their tweets and updates get lost in the other social media arenas I frequent. I also like the fact that there’s no character limit on my comments, a big advantage over Twitter.

Finally – and I’m not sure whether this is good or bad – Buzz is right there when I check my email, so I find myself using more than a few other social media sites. It’s hard to resist that unread icon. Placing it within email was a smart, but distracting, move.

My Buzz Wish List

I do have a short wish list of things I’d like to see on Buzz to make the experience more useful and enjoyable for bloggers. Many of these are already available in other Google products so presumably they could be implemented soon:

• presentation of Buzz posts in reverse chronological order
• ability to filter by date, type, user and more
• the ability to group Buzzes in a cloud, list, magazine format so that you can cut through the noise (another form of filtering)
• the ability to automatically remove duplicate entries posted from different sources (as in Google search)

What’s on your Buzz wish list?

Riding The Google Buzz Bandwagon


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/