Ever search for something in Google and found your content on another site? I have, often. One of the more damaging issues to your blog is when your copyrighted content is stolen and placed on another blog - and here's the kicker - the content on the other blog has a higher pagerank than yours and is ahead of you in the search results! Quite frankly that's terrible as it negatively impacts your blog. Not to mention the annoyance when you note that the blog stealing your content appears to be earning advertising revenue, with excessive ads plastered all around it. I've posted about this subject before in "How to Deter Scrapers and Hotlinkers", which discusses a bit more of the hands-on and some web based tools you can use to help protect your content. Many of us have may have read all sorts of articles and other blog posts that delve into the legalities, copyright laws, rights and so forth. That's not something I'm going to discuss as I think there's too much discussion (and not enough action). If not, just take a look on Google and you'll find a plethora of posts on the subject. The fact of the matter ...

I had an interesting discussion about blog and web site traffic sources with a colleague of mine over the weekend. He was looking at the changing landscape of web traffic, especially how his blogs were outperforming his "traditional" web sites. He alluded to an earlier post of mine "Why Blogs May Be Better Than Traditional Sites", and suggested that the changing face of how data is accessed, shared, exchanged, mashed up, etc. should also be reflected in the web statistics of blog owners. He suggested (among other things) that traditional linking, wherein you ask a site owner to exchange links is an antiquated method that simply does not hold true in today's changing webscape. I disagreed until he suggested I take a look at the number of social web sites that are driving traffic to any one of my blogs. I chose my Linux (Ubuntu) based blog, selecting the statistics for a full year (July 17, 2007 to July 17, 2008 - Since it I didn't start promoting it until July) and was rather surprised by a couple things. I assumed that Google would still be the prime traffic source. I also assumed that all the links from other (non-blog, "traditional" ...

Whenever I present a seminar at the local business centre, one of the first questions I’m asked are what a blog is. Such questions are commonly asked by new business owners who are not as web savvy as they’d like to be. After all, they are experts in their own industries, not in blogging or Internet content dissemination systems in general. I received a few email messages from friends this morning, after I told them about a new blog launch. To answer such a question, I could dive into the technical aspects (I’m a certified Network Engineer MCSE among others), as much as the practical aspects (that would perhaps, make more sense to the business owner). While googling does provide a lot of definitions, I’m not really sure that they grasp the meat and potatoes of blogging. To define a blog in its simplest terms: A blog empowers a business to reach a wider audience and continue a conversation with them, by providing readers with in demand, quality, syndicated content. Blogs are beneficial in that they allow business owners to add content to their blogs as needed, without requiring the services of a web site developer or designer (to update the content). ...