All Things Cahill

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  • What to do if you’re Splogged

    (Disclosure: I am not a lawyer.  If you need real legal advice to fight copyright theft, find a real lawyer…don’t go by what I say.)

    The call came in this morning via Twitter: “Hey – Someone stole a friends WP blog content and put the content on another domain. What option exist to stop this?!”

    It’s a common occurrence with WordPress blogs to have your content grabbed by a “Splogger” or spam blogger. Wikipedia:

    Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen (see blog scraping) from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

    In a nutshell, someone is using the content they’re stealing off your blog to do something, such as increase linking for SEO, or earn Adsense revenue, etc.

    Here are two things to make content theft a little less likely:

    • Send only RSS Summaries – Go to WordPress admin -> Settings -> Reading and change the setting for “For each article in a feed, show” to Summary.  This will keep your full text from being grabbed.  The problem is that your RSS subscribers will only see summaries of your posts.  Which probably isn’t a bad thing…
    • Do not automatically approve trackbacks – some of these folks are looking for link backs.  Don’t automatically approve pingback/trackbacks and you might even want to put a rel= nofollow on comment links.

    Other than that you’re going to be forced to track them down.  Here are the steps you need to take:

    • Whois Search – find out who owns the domain and who is hosting it.  You’re going to need to notify both of them.
    • Send a Cease and Desist Letter to the site owner – Jonathan Bailey at PlagiarismToday.com has a good stock letter available, as well as tons of information on this subject.  See his “Stock Letters” page. Of course, in most cases, they’re going to be hard to find.
    • Send a DMCA Take Down Notice to the Host – Again, grab a stock take down notice from the same page linked above. I find out as much as I can, then contact the hosts abuse@ email address requesting take down.  They generally turn around and send an email about how to properly request a take down.  Follow their instructions TO THE LETTER.

    Now here is my normal course of action (and Jonathan Bailey is going to be really annoyed…):  I do nothing.  I’ve become complacent.  Splogs may be a pain, but if they can only grab my summary, there’s little harm here.  Yes it ticks me off, but I’ve expended a lot of energy sending take downs, etc.,  and in the long term, it comes to little or no benefit to me.

    If you really want the low down on this stuff, you need to read PlagiarismToday.com – it’s a tremendous resource.

  • WordPress 2.8.1 Released

    I really used to look forward to WordPress updates, probably because there were so many things that needed to be fixed.  Now we’re at a point where it’s in very good shape, and, frankly, the interim releases are kind of boring.

    Still, it’s good to see that I can finally click on automatic update, for either plugins, or the main software itself, and it actually does the update.

    In other WordPress news, they have a new developers survey out for 2.9 image handling feature prioritization.  My general sense as I filled it out was that there wasn’t anything earth shattering on the list.  Again, a function of a fairly well featured system.

    The only area I can think of that I think really needs further development right now is the workflow, but honestly, it’s not as though its not working for me.  Simple workflow is good enough for my needs…but I know there are others for whom that simply doesn’t work.

    So tell me, what do you think WordPress needs in the future?

  • Voicemail R.I.P.

    See that big red button...95% more likely for me to hit it than the green one...
    See that big red button…95% more likely for me to hit it than the green one…

    Boston.com has an interesting article today entitled “At the tone, please don’t leave a message” heralding the death of voicemail.

    In an age of ever-speedier communications, a growing number of people are unwilling to endure voice mail’s shortcomings. Some can’t stand the endless prompts just to hear a longwinded – and often pointless – message. (Hi, it’s me. Why aren’t you picking up? I’ll call you later.) Others dislike voice mails that can’t be searched, easily forwarded, or surreptitiously played during a meeting or lecture. And on the off chance a message does contain key information, it’s often left at the end of a ramble and spoken rapidly, forcing the recipient to listen all over again. And then write it down, of course.

    Time for a bit of utter truth here: I hate voicemail.  I ignore it.  I rarely, if ever, listen to them.  People occassionally will tell me “hey, did you know your voicemail is full?” The short answer to that is “yes, that is purely intentional.  The only reason it is full is that ATT doesn’t allow me to turn it off altogether.”

    Leaving a voicemail for me is second only to calling me at home on my landline on my “reasons I probably won’t be talking to you on a phone anytime in the near future” list.

  • Social Networking for Tween Girls

    It was utterly inevitable…via CruchGear and Matt Brodeur:

    So this seems like a good enough idea. It’s called MySecretCircle and it’s basically it’s a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter’s personal info.

    In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween doesn’t connect with creeps like me. Kids can only connect with friends that have their private key – no one else exists in the site except for Sabrina Circle, the Tom of this candy-pink MySpace.

    Social networking and tweeners is a match made in heaven for them, and hell for us parents.  Can’t you just hear it “Daddy, she flamed me…”

    It sounds like a great idea, but I think they’ve missed something in the realm of parental control.  I’ll have a good look soon, and if it works, I’m sure I’ll have two little beta testers pounding the keys before you know it.

  • A Month Without Blogging…

    Madison at Newburyport
    Madison at Newburyport

    Not my personal choice, but more a relection on how utterly busy I have been.  Some great stuff going on, some not so great, but such is the natural progression of life.

    I have an interesting comment from my 11 yo daughter Madison on my about page:

    “hi, dad! Whats up? So……can I have an account for All Things Cahill,or the family website,pretty please with 100,000,000,000,000 CHERRYS on top.”

    My first knee jerk reaction was pretty much what you’d expect…then I thought about what my objections are:

    • Controlling what she posts – kids don’t generally understand what’s appropriate to share and what is meant to be kept private.
    • It’s my site, and my byline – she might post or do something on my blog that would reflect on me.

    After a little thought, I realize that both of these concerns are easily dealt with.  By setting her up as a contributor to the blog, I would have to publish her posts, affording me the chance to read them.  Similarly, if I were to enforce upon her a particular category, I could exclude it from my main page, and force her off onto her own page, something like http://www.allthingscahill.com/madison and if I wanted to, I might even make that page password protected so that I could be sure I knew who was reading her posts.

    So, for now, it looks like I’m going to grant her request.  More on this shortly…

    In other general news, I have been tweeting a lot of Reel-Time.com under the Twitter handle Reel_Time – and I have found that tweeting as an informational stream for a site is pretty cool.  I’m using CoTweet thanks to Esteban and I’ve found I really like their service.  Hootsuite is similar, and is currently open to the public as well.

  • The Fun Continues…

     

    Im lucky this didnt happen to me
    I'm lucky this didn't happen to me

    I got in my truck to go to the office Monday morning and tthe brake pedal went to the floor.  Very lucky to have had it happen there, rather than on the road.  The mechanic described it as a “catastrophic rear brake failure” which required replacement of all the rear brake components.

     

    A few random observations:

    • Rss becoming even more important to the interoperability of websites and content tools. I’ve got 5 separate projects for different sites, all of which seem to need a decent script to process. The funny thing is  that I wrote just such a script in 2003 for Reel-Time.
    • Google Wave will be a force moving forward – but I am always concerned about committing to components in my sites that are not under my control.  Their reliance on javascript which allows for asynchronous processing goes a long way toward answering my questions.
    • Twitter is becoming the cesspool I predicted – retweet bots and dm spammers are making it a place I wish to associate with less and less.  Perhaps it’s time to give my friends list an enema.
    • Developers may force HTML 5 adoption – there are lots of very cool things that can be done, and I suspect many of us do not want to wait 6 more years to start leveraging them.
    • I miss my boat – okay, maybe not so much that boat, but the fun I had on it.  I really need to find something, but unfortunately my finances have a different story to tell.  Even worse, read the first paragraph again, and that bit screams “time for a new truck.”
    • There simply aren’t enough hours – so I guess I may have to give up sleeping.
    • Fishing with my daughters is one of my favorite things to do.

  • In the Weeds

    I’ve been utterly in the weeds for the past two weeks.  I should break free tomorrow and will get back to more regular posts.

  • How NOT to Research a Story – USA Today

    (Disclaimer: I work for Namemedia, Inc. who is one of the largest owners and resellers of domains in the world.  I don’t work in that end of the business, and I don’t speak for them.)

    I picked up an interesting article today via David Churbuck’s Delicious.com feed, from USA Today with the salacious title “‘Cybersquatting’ crooks profit on marketers’ brand names.”

    Now I hate cybersquatting, but I have to say this, which I said yesterday and have said ad nauseum over the years: your domain name is a business asset.  A corollary to that would be that you need to protect it, just as you would any business asset.

    Simply put, if you’re planning to launch a new brand and you haven’t secured the appropriate domain names that are associated with that brand, you are a fool.  At the very least, you’ll be increasing the value of something you will most likely need to buy at some point.  So do your homework!

    The thing that ticked me off about this article was the fact that it appearred as though the writer had written it right off a Marketing Association press release. It showed almost no thought about the issue, and in appearance, seemed to aim at driving home a single, shop worn idea: cybersquatting is bad.  Wow, hold the presses.

    There are several other sides to this, none of which are considered, mentioned, or apparently, even though of.

    •  What happens when I own a domain and one of the big guys decides to create a new brand using the same name, such as yesterday’s example of Blatz.com.  Are we proposing that even with “prior art” I should reassign the domain to them, simply because I otherwise might be considered “cybersquatting?”
    • Is it not the companies responsibility to protect their own brand?  There is plenty of history with people setting up shopping sites under unused brand name inspired domains.
    • If you didn’t buy a particular domain, you cannot consider revenues made on that site “lost revenues” associated with your brand.
    • The assumption underlying this article is obvious, that sales made via third party shopping sites, etc. necessarily would have gone to the brand with which they might have appeared to be associated.  In my experience,  such sales are generally more casual impulse buys.  

    Here’s the part that makes me really annoyed:

    They drive people to a “squatted” site via e-mails or through paid search. Once they’ve led someone there, they hope to steal credit card information, spur clicks on ads to skim revenue from online ad networks or sell fake products, such as pharmaceuticals or pricey handbags.

    Since when did USA Today decide it was a nepharious act to show advertising to people on your own website, in hopes that they might actually click on it?  Is that not THEIR OWN REVENUE MODEL?  Further, is not email or paid search also condsidered marketing?  Why would marketing one’s own website be considered “theft?”

    Listen, I don’t cybersquat and I don’t condone it, but this article is simply ludicrous.  USA Today, stop phoning in your work…

  • Social Media Community Building 101 – The Right Domain Name

    <This is part 3 in my series on Social Media Community Building.  You will find all of my pieces on this subject by checking out this tag: Social Media 101. Disclosure: this post is about selecting and buying domain names.  I work for a company that owns the largest aftermarket domain name listing service in the world, Namemedia, although that is not what I do for them. >

    One of the key points you need to consider when you are building your Social Media Community is the domain name.  The right name can make your site, while the wrong one brings with it more baggage than you could possibly imagine.  The general list of considerations:

    • The shorter the better – If I were building a community for septic tank cleaning professionals, I’d look for something like “septicpros.com” rather than “septic-pro-media-forums.com”  – on the face of it, less letters to type.
    • Make the name a Search  Keyword that you’d expect someone to enter into Google to find you.  Hence “Blatz.com” wouldn’t be as desirable as “tennisbuddies.com” when you’re doing a Tennis social media site.  Plus, the domain name is one of the things Google gives you points for in their alrogithm.  Hence, given identical content and in bound links, TennisBuddy.com will do better than the nonsensical blatz.com.
    • Try to Avoid the Alternate Top Level Domains – .Com is the gold standard here.  .Net is acceptable, and .Mobi is fine for your Iphone stuff.  I don’t use .us, or any of the other alternates.  Why?  Because they don’t get direct type in traffic, and its really easy to build your site up, only to have someone sharp that owns the .Com TLD siphon off your traffic by constructing a similar site.  How do they get your traffic?  Most of your users will inevitably type .Com instead of .FooBar or whatever you have at some point.  Too big a business risk in my estimation.
    • Avoid Misspelling Problems – If it’s hard to type, you’re going to have people ending up at the wrong place.  Once again, keep it simple.

    Have  people found success doing the opposite of my suggestions?  Sure, probably the best example was http://del.icio.us – but even they have now given in, having bought delicious.com and directing their primary traffic through that domain instead.

    Okay, so your next thought is this:  “Nice advice, but all the good domain names were bought up years ago.  We’re gonna have to go with http://xtrptser.com because it’s the only one left.”

    Not so…there is the domain aftermarket.  My employer, Namemedia Inc. owns over 900,000 domain names, which can be bought via BuyDomains.com or at Afternic.com – which is  a “Multiple Listing Service for Domain Names.”  Together with our partners, we list something in the area of 2 million domain names (don’t quote me directly on that, it’s a rough estimate, not exact).  They’ve also got plenty of trained domain professionals who can help you through the purchase and transfer process.

    So now you can get access to a whole lot of excellent domain names, which should make your new Social Media Website a winner.

    My view on domains is this: they are a very important business asset for any business. In the case of niche social media sites, they may be one of your most important assets.  Thus buying the right one is of utter importance.  There are many places in the building of your site where you will be able to cut a few corners, but this is not a place to do that.

  • Does Twitter Dilute Media Brands?

    For the past couple weeks I’ve been tweeting for the Reel-Time.com site under the Twitter handle “Reel_Time” and I’ve found some very interesting trends.  Most disturbing is that Twitter doesn’t really appear to be an extension of the conversations that start on my site, it appears to be something wholly different.  Similar conversations in a place where I don’t get any ad revenue.

    As of yet, I’m not seeing this as increasing the value of the Reel-time.com brand.  Of course, while twitter may be hitting the mainstream, I suspect we’re still on the bleeding edge of Twitter in the saltwater fly fishing niche.  It just seems that where my readers used to find me, I am now trying to find them.  A horribly upside down delivery model it is when you’re starting out!

    The Bad, or Not So Good:

    • Spammers – they apparently target new accounts – a good number of my initial followers apparently thought I wanted to pay for the “secrets of making millions via twitter”.  For the record, I don’t think there is anyone out there making THOUSANDS yet.
    • Mostly Shops, Guides and Website Owners – in a lot of ways its me and my competitors talking.  Honestly, that makes me want to share…less.
    • Haphazard Marketing – I’ve seen several shops or guides who don’t have a website or haven’t updated that website in over a year.  Yet they have time to tweet on a regular basis.  Tweeting is nice, but take care of your marketing 101 basics first.

    The Good:

    • Fishing Reports – while my forum users macerate on the implications of posting fishing reports via Twitter, its already happening and there are enough respected industry names doing it that I can say with certainty, fishing reports via twitter are here to stay.
    • Immediacy – I’m a big fan of  “right the heck now.”  I hate to wait.  Twitter means I won’t have to wait.
    • New Enough That We Can Make This What We Want – I suspect the real gold here is in the hashtagging of reports.  If we develop a way of tagging that makes regional sense (most New Englander’s don’t need reports from Maryland) then we’ll all win.  I generally hate protocols, but this may just be what we need.  Something like #SWF-BOS for Boston area reports…then fight to keep it from becoming another Usenet.

    The trial continues…