InvestorBlogger has been full-feed for quite some time, but last week I was astonished to find that someone was republishing the entire content. That evening I wrote both the blogger, the domain company to find out what was going on, and Google Search which was starting to show up duplicate content for my own work. This was my brief but courteous letter…

Dear Admin,

I recently found that you are republishing my content on your blog in its entirety. Since you have neither requested permission nor even contacted me about this, I must ask that you stop reproducing my content in its entirety IMMEDIATELY. You must also remove the content that is present on your blog, as this constitutes a breach of copyright. MY copyright.

You may produce 50 word summaries, if you wish. I have no problem with that, but you CANNOT reproduce my blog’s content in the way you are doing. I have already gathered evidence of this, and will press this case further if required to do so.

Yours,
Kenneth Dickson

Well, Markus wrote back and advised me:

I’m sorry I bought this address with hosting and never realised there was a blog on it. I’m truly sorry for any problems I may have caused you. It will be permanently removed. (spelling corrected).

The problem is now resolved due to the good graces of the blogger who inadvertently owned the blog after purchasing the domain from someone else. However, I also advised the hosting company through its ‘abuse@maiahost.com’ address, which turned out to be not working (very impressive, MaiaHost) and also through its support page. Less helpfully, their support suggested:

Dear Kenneth,

Can you please issue DMCA notice to us and the other website. With this we
can try to suspend him and make him clean it up.

Venetsian,
Maiahost Support

A DMCA, for what it’s worth, is a bit like opening an egg with a hammer… I thought it would be effective, but I would have preferred a quiet word with the customer first option. At least, I know what a DMCA is, and how to request one. I hope I never need it.

Feed Choices?

I’m now reconsidering my RSS feeds, and wondering whether I should let blogs (yes, blogs…!) reproduce my full feed posts including advertisements and et al., as long as the URLs are all untouched and in place. I already have a copyright notice in place… How do you handle your feeds? Have you ever been splogged?

There is a huge land rush going on for social networks and for the longest time, Google has been on the outside, looking in. Myspace, FaceBook, LinkedIn have all come along and created huge audiences for social networks; smaller players have carved valuable niches, such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and so on.

But Google has failed singularly to come up with its own successful social network. Until now.

Introducing: Google Friends Connect…

Google writes: “Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site. Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.”

Google Friends Connect is a way to bring the social networking world out into the real world allowing webmasters to add a simple code element, visit the website, and configure the social networking features required. This turning the social world inside out is going to be very welcome to webmasters and users and will enable new ways to find existing websites. The walled worlds of FaceBook, Linked In and so on have been pretty frustrating for me: I hate having to login each day just to get useless updates and waste time removing or adding pointless applications that have little relationship with the rest of the web. This will a terrific advance for bloggers, who although they use social networking a lot, find that social networking means that they and their visitors are now interacting OFF the website, not on it. Why maintain two or even more subsidiary sites when you can maintain one primary site!?

Just watch the video.

Having ranted on the recent post about spending money, I was reminded of the Tax Back scheme that the US government is endorsing now. In this video, some Americans are talking about their plans: and they are not SPLURGING… They are using the money to pay for education, mortgages, and basic stuff. Few are planning to spend it… but that’s what they say they will do…

If you’d like some ideas on how to make that stimulus check work FOR you, not against you, then get the RSS Feed Download and do some reading! [download#1]