This site is a member of Entrecard, a network of bloggers driving and boosting traffic all around the blogosphere. At least that’s the idea. I have been a member for about six months now and it has its pros and cons. One thing is true- it is a fun way of discovering blogs which you would have otherwise never found on your own! Its directory has thousands of blogs divided in 52 categories where you are sure to find some great ones.

The idea is to visit each other’s site by way of dropping an internet business card- dubbed as entrecard. You drop and I drop sort of thing and along the way come upon blogs you really like and then you can say to yourself that you have time well spent surfing. I am not a regular user (because it could be time consuming) but I do enjoy being a member.

This post is in response to the Entrecard team initiative of holding the first “Top Dropper Day”. Most sites have been doing such recognizing their top visitors or top droppers but has never been official until today.

Simply answer the question: Who is your favorite Entrecard blogger or What is your favorite Entrecard blog and why? That’s it! Let them know you joined and you’re entered to win! First prize is $40.00 Paypal cash, second is $30.00 and 3 $10.00 will be given as consolation prize!

If you want to help promote the contest, they’re also giving away 3 $10.00 to random promoters of the contest.

On top of that, they’re giving away 100 Entrecard credits to the first 20 bloggers joining or promoting the contest! That’s a total of 2,000 credits up for grabs and the total cash prize at $130.00!

Contest ends on February 10. Winners will be announced on February 15. Plenty of time to join but don’t wait too long… Entrecard credits are almost gone! Here is the contest link. Good luck!

As a last note: they’ve made use of this Google apps that acts and looks like a widget! I’d love to make use of that some time. Anyone can embed it to their own site! Cool!

If you are a frequent visitor to this site, you would have noticed that the site’s look have changed three times since I moved to WordPress a year ago. The changes aren’t drastic and huge- just small things here and there hopefully to make it more appealing and user-friendly.

The beauty and magic of  WordPress selfhosting is the countless possibilities of what you can do and what is available since everything is open source (free to change and do whatever for personal usage). There are plenty of FREE premium quality themes just sitting around, you just know how to search for it. I don’t have a favorite source for themes but usually just scouring the web with the right keywords would bring great finds. Try “free premium themes WP,” “wordpress free themes,” “quality WP templates,” etc. just mix and match!

I had several choices but the Purple Fever theme won it for me. It’s what I am looking for now, a structured and blocked layout. How can you go wrong with what was once a $49.00 theme now given away for free? The question is how long am I going to keep it? I can’t say because while changing themes keeps your site fresh and dynamic- boy, they take a huge amount of time to set up! For this theme, I had to redo and add several things that were not there before like putting thumbnail images on posts via custom fields, new plugins and changing the stylesheet (css) to the look and colors I wanted. Moving into a new theme requires different set ups which can be minor or major but doable nonetheless- just takes time.

Image Rotator

One of the things I incorporated with the new theme is the image rotator for my header. Everytime you refresh the page or go to the inner pages, the header image changes randomly. There are several plugins available for it at the WP site but none as simple, fast and easy to maintain as that from the brains of WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg. He calls it simply The Photo Matt Random Image Script.

The downside of WordPress plugins sometimes is it is heavy on your site and the loading time is long or slow. I’ve uninstalled plugins because of that no matter how good they are. With this simple image script, you just create a php file, place the unlimited photos you want and call it like you would a normal image to where you want the images to appear and you have an  instant image rotator! It is such a no brainer script that I was able to create it without running into issues. If you want to try this on your site, check out his full article about it first and read the entire comment section for advice and fixes on images not rotating- because of caching issues in IE and Firefox. If you’re still having trouble, let me know I might be able to help or you can always try commenting on Matt’s site- you might get support from there too.

UPDATED: Contact Page

A contact page is a must have on any blog. It is a way for readers to directly contact a blogger for private messaging without broadcasting the message as a comment that may appear on the comments page when automatically approved! I am not sure WHY I am unable to install them on my site correctly since all these WordPress upgrades! I have been using the most popular contact form plugin, CformsII for the longest time until it stopped working on the site during WP 2.6 upgrade! I’ve tried similar plugins to no avail and I really couldn’t pinpoint what’s wrong.

The solution? Contact form widgets!! I didn’t even know they existed until I was desperate enough to search for it. I just found the best contact form so far!! Check it out on my contact page. It’s simple, not flashy but just what I need and it was such a breeze to create! Thank you to Wufoo.com- another great web find!

I’m placing the contact forms that I initially tried here for posterity. They are still working and you can still send me a mail via this forms.

I am currently trying two contact forms which I found on widgetbox.com. One is from a site called Contactify.com which requires a simple registration that was fast and easy. And the other a Thunderbird Contact form promoting Mozilla Thunderbird. What the hey, I love Firefox so I’m using the form!! Contactify though still in beta is the highest rated/tested widget under its category so it’s worth the try. I can’t decide which one I like to keep so I’m placing the two for the time being. I’ve tried and tested both and got the mails quick! See both of them live on my contact page! When there, send me a note saying which one you like better!

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By now all Friendster bloggers must have gotten the memo sent out by the Friendster team, of the sudden migration from Friendster Typepad to Friendster WordPress in early September. I wrote about it first on September 3rd, in shock that no word was said about the transition.

I didn’t stop there. When I re-visited the Friendster Official blog site on September 9 looking for answers I still didn’t find it so I left an exacting comment (#31) on their most recent post at that time, dated August 12th to express my frustration! Yay, I heard back from them and Ross of Friendster commented back on my Friendster blog the following:

“We’re sorry about the confusion and lack of information. We’ve focused our communication to our most-active bloggers. Unfortunately for you, that meant you were not emailed. We plan to make a general announcement in the coming week or so.”

Hmp! I’m hurt not being considered their ‘most-active’ blogger just because I have not blogged in Friendster for a year! LOL. I don’t know about that lousy excuse because two days after my comment on their blog, they finally announced the new format and sent out the same information to all members of Friendster who owns a blog via email! How much effort did they exert creating that simple post and email? I bet it didn’t take 5 minutes to create! So why they waited for over a week to transmit the announcement to non-active bloggers boggles the mind! In the first place, what’s the difference? Active or not active, when you get the announcement, it’s up for the user to react or not. Why hold the information to non-active bloggers?! Isn’t it as simple as hitting the SEND ALL button?!

Enough said on that.

P.S. Friendster Typepad didn’t have “tagging,” a key feature in WordPress! So now all my old posts have no tags and I am too lazy to put any!!! Grrrr!

P.S.P.S. Would Friendster add more WordPress themes please???

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Sixth Step: Paying attention to site statistics

I wasn’t. I only started doing it concurrently upon joining Entrecard sometime in June 2008. I wasn’t even checking my Adsense account until recently! A mistake on my part and one which newbies should take into consideration when blogging. You should pay attention to your statistics! They can give you important points as to what your visitors are reading, what they’re searching, how they got to your site and where they come from. It is very interesting. Though different sites give varying tracking information and results, it is more or less consistent and close to each other. Google analytics, e-referrer.com, histats.com, feedburner.com, feedjit.com are all great tools and must haves to study your stats.

I just installed e-referrer stats on July 27and it already tracked 3,961 visits. 1,674 of that came from Google searches! At the same time I installed flagcounter that shows 2200 US visits since July 27. I didn’t even realize I get an average of 100-150 visits a day according to the trackers. I would have been happy with 10 visits a day! Topblogs.com tracking Philippine sites says I’ve had close to 11,000 page views since June 15- the day I joined! I have a PageRank of 2 and my feedburner says I have 40-50 readers on average.

Alexa ranking is wonderful as well, when I checked my site a while back it was in the 1 million ranking. I saw it shrink in number since then! Right now it says, I’m ranked at 188,988!! 230,000! According to Alexa, 64% of my users come from the US. Makes sense since I’m in the US, what I couldn’t believe is that the Philippines isn’t on my TOP 5 users!! How did that happen? I’ve always thought most of my readers come from the Philippines. Here I am wrong again.

I mentioned about the “Sinigang” keyword and how I appear on that search. That’s not even the BEST part when I reiterate how important content is. By paying attention to my site stats I was able to see that majority of my traffic wasn’t coming from other bloggers or all these networking sites at all! Except for entrecard which comes second in my referrer list, I get the most traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN searches! How cool is that?! Because search engines find most of my “quality” content relevant and useful, I appear in various keyword searches when it calls for it. It means someone looking for Arnel Pineda or Kapatagan, Camp Sabros or Julia Roberts or Lea Salonga or Broadway or even Pinay Scandal and Sexy Filipina and Filipina images arrives to the site from Google! I love the latter part! I can imagine someone typing Pinay porn and end up disappointed finding this is not a porn site! It is the only SEO related content I did to help an initiative to reshape the Filipina Image on the internet! I wrote the article over a year ago I think and people are still finding it by Googling somehow. More people should write decent articles about the keywords Filipina, Filipina images, Pinay, etc. to level the playing field.

Another great thing I discover is that people actually stay on the site an average of 3 to 5 minutes and get 4 to 6 page views a visit. This is something every blogger should think about. Getting traffic is one thing but getting people to stay at your site for even one minute is a huge task. You must have heard of bounce rate. Wiki explains: “It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. If your bounce rate is high, then you need to do something about it. It means that your readers are NOT really visiting your site but was just there long enough for your site to load, skimmed through your headline and moved on to the next site.

Entrecard (EC) comes to mind. This is the downside of this powerful and effective advertising exchange network for bloggers. In my desire to drop the maximum 300 cards to 300 websites daily, I was doing the same. As soon as the page loaded, found the Entrecard widget- dropped my card and moved on- sometimes not even noticing the blog name or who or what site it was I just visited. I was “bouncing” every 5 seconds from one blog to the next. I felt awful. It didn’t feel right. I stopped doing that at once and only visit a few now to which I actually stay and read some of its articles! But how many people are still bouncing to earn EC credits? You can’t stop them from doing that. That’s why you need some quality content to have actual readers coming into your site who are not necessarily bloggers to balance off your bounce rate. I must say that you should have at least more articles directed for general public rather than purely blogging related posts targeted at bloggers.

I have a funny feeling that some bloggers are not really readers. Most bloggers would visit your site and attempt to read ONLY your latest article. They rarely check out past or old articles. They’re busy people and they don’t have the time to explore our website. They have lots of SEO to do and only have little time left to care about their own sites foremost while balancing offline life. Where does that leave us? If you maintain a personal blog, you have to go after the non-bloggers to read your stuff. You know they’re coming when your inner pages are being read coming from search engines using keywords to land on your articles. You know they’re coming when your older popular pages have page ranks in them different from your homepage. Make that a goal: to have a page rank in some of your inner pages. You could have a PR of 4 in your homepage or landing page but if the rest of your inner pages have no rankng in them, it still means you are not getting enough reads or page views.

My tracking stats is an open book, find it on my sidebar to further see the numbers.

Bonus: Monetizing the blog

I found out along the way that people are making money blogging, in fact majority of blogs are geared towards making money online. Note that I did NOT add this to the steps in blogging because I don’t think as a personal blogger that this should be part of our goal. It is an added bonus to our site that we could earn something from what we’re doing but to focus on just making money online without putting any effort to our posts is not the ideal path to go. Money isn’t everything. Either change your niche into something else but don’t go talking about Botox or dishwashers when your site is postcard collecting for example (my other blog).

There’s nothing wrong with Pay per post blogs, I found some great ones that are successful in mixing both paid and personal articles. However, some bloggers put in article after article that are nothing but paid advertisements with paid text links cloaked in some made up personal story to make it appear that the product is actually helpful or necessary when the product or service isn’t even available to the blogger’s location. How do you build credibility when you start recommending Circuit City or Best Buy to your readers when you’re blogging in the Philippines or Australia? Except visiting their websites, you’ve never been to any of its physical stores, you’ve never received any shipments from them because they don’t ship internationally, you can’t be telling me why I should shop at these stores. You can’t tell me about heating systems either or snow removal tools because it is non-existent in the Philippines!

It’s all about choosing the products or services to review that can blend in well with your blog. Don’t go grabbing every imaginable ads because most readers would frown on a personal site that has PAID written all over it. In the end, what you have is a personal paid blog with no relevant content and value to your readers. You’re earning sure but you’re writing for the companies who pay you to blog. I say, balance it out. You can’t cover every paid ad especially the ones that are totally unrelated or sticking out like a sore thumb in your site. I also can’t stress enough the importance of disclosure. Personal bloggers should be transparent to their readers. Aside from a disclosure page it would add more credibility to your site to note  that you’re writing a paid post, either at the top or bottom of that page.

I studied at my options. One thing I didn’t explore in at was completely monetizing my site with all kinds of PAY PER POST memberships. It works for most bloggers, just NOT for me. Again, great to earn on the side but personally, not to the point where my writings are going to be dictated by some company and be paid to “lie” for saying this such product is great when I have not tried it(!) or worse that I actually tried it and it sucked but I couldn’t say it because the company won’t accept and pay for a negative review! I would only like to have third party ads on my site. They’re unobtrusive and just there for readers to click or not, ignore or not. I don’t have to render false or unreal opinion about what the ads offer. I joined affiliate networking sites. These are sites where you get either points or money referring others via ads and links. I also added Google Adsense. It seem to make sense so I applied hoping to get cents that would later translate to actual money! After a year of blogging, I’m happy to say that I got my first payment from Google for $113.60! Yet, I have a renewal bill for my hosting and domain, etc for $200.00!! I’m still short! LOL

This ends my State of the blog address! What are you waiting for? Go start that blog you’ve been putting off already! Until next year…

I have decided to make September 28 my blogversary. This was the date I bravely shifted from Friendster blog into Blogger blog exactly a year ago (I went live on September 30th). At that time, I knew nothing about real blogging even though I was already into it early 2005 via my Friendster account.

Since this is my first SOBA, I wish to give a background on the simple steps I did to get me started into blogging in my niche and my current position and state. I don’t have bragging rights- I’m not claiming to be anything. I don’t have any official blog awards. I don’t get a thousand or more views a day, I don’t earn much from it and I’m not trying to be the best blogger.

What I do have is decent and consistent traffic and page views. There’s something to be said there. Blogging shouldn’t be complicated. Blog happy and simply! This is dedicated to all newbies- what I was a year ago!

First step: Blog hopping and Finding your niche

For the most part blog hopping helped me a great deal while starting! It’s the best teaching tool for any newbie wanting to start their own blogs. It’s like window shopping for a website with live working themes and plugins and sidebars. As I navigate from one blog to the next, I learned what could work for me or not! There are some really sleek, neat looking blogs out there but there are also tons of crappy, sloppy ones! Sifting each, taking the best and discarding the rest- I was able to formulate what I want in my website.

I wanted a personal mixed bag for this site, allowing me the flexibility to talk on any subjects from family, travels, music, media, entertainment, opinion, photography, TV, the internet, technology, love/dislike of country, etc. I wanted a simple theme layout with black as the main background.

I followed up this site with a hobby blog, showcasing my interest in postcard collecting and then later on with a blog for a restobar I co-own in the Philippines, and then a Filipino Quotes blog to post quotations related to anything Filipino or the Philippines either by Filipinos or foreigners.

The best learning experience is going out there and blog hop! Call it lurking, spying, checking out, snooping- the only way to discover what you want in your blog is by learning from others. That’s what I would call it.

Second step: Choosing a blog platform

Venturing with Google’s Blogger platform was a smart move because there was no pressure to do everything right from day one as it was free. Free in the internet is awesome! Free allowed me to experiment on a lot of things, messed with the HTML codes and fixed them (without knowing how I made it worked again)!

With a blogging platform in place and a theme, I was ready to blog away! I imported most of my old posts from Friendster just so I could have content right away and so I could see how posts would look like in Blogger with photos and all. Wait, I didn’t import them with a click of a button! I had to manually copy and paste each article because Blogger and Typepad aren’t talking to each other. Blogger for that matter does not have an import/ export feature period. That was a pain.

Once I learned the basics, after 3 months with Blogger, I shoot for the stars and headed to the BEST BLOG PLATFORM there is, WordPress. WordPress self-hosted isn’t free. You have to commit to blogging because once you start paying for it, it’s not going to be pleasing for you all the way.

Third Step: Getting Internet traffic with Social Networking

With a week’s worth of content, the next step was how do I get people to see my new site? Social networking and blog directory is the answer. In Friendster, my readers were mainly contacts on my lists and people already on Friendster. I didn’t bother promoting it. I wrote, I published and that was that.

To successfully kick off any blog in the “real” blogging world, you need to self-promote it initially. There is no way, people will magically visit your site without any kind of announcement. That is like preparing for a huge birthday party for yourself. You prepared for weeks, cooked laboriously, spent endless nights cleaning your house and filling in loose ends. On the day of your birthday, everything is set. You waited for people to come expecting they would remember your birthday and come to your house to visit. Nobody came except your family. You forgot one important thing while busily preparing for your supposed huge party- you forgot to sent out the invitations!!! Get the picture? Invite people to your site.

I joined Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, Spicy, Fuelmyblog, Romlet, Stumble Upon and the latest- Entrecard. I submitted my sites to tons of blog directories and exchanged links with blogs I liked. I was promoting my site to my Friendster, Multiply and Facebook accounts. I was rolling.

Fourth step: Pacing yourself

At this point, your visibility in social networks are now working for you. People are flocking to your site. it is now time to loosen up a little bit. This is hard to do when you’re pumped up because people are taking notice and coming to your site by the number.

In the “real” world of blogging, most bloggers take everything seriously; obsessively and excessively if I may say so! I honestly felt the rush in my first few months myself! I wanted to publish as many posts as I could, visit as many sites as possible to gain mutual visits and find all possible topics in God’s creation for a post. There was a need to check my blog multiple times a day and tweak my codes until it stops working and then spend time fixing it again! And again!

The challenge is to pace even restrain ourselves so we don’t get burned out. If we don’t overcome the “addiction” to blog excessively in the first few months, once we withdraw from it- it’s all over. We will lose interest altogether and end blogging as fast as when we started it.

On a good month, I try to blog twice a week. On a bad month, I’d be lucky if I could blog once a month. That’s ok. The key is continuity and creating timeless quality content.

Fifth Step: Getting Internet traffic with Quality Content

This is the most important step that most newbies fail at. Why? Because as in other cases, we all want easy and we all have one thing in mind, capitalizing on our sites. How to make money online?! After making friends with other bloggers, growing popularity in social network groups, traffic increasing, we want to make money now- and fast!!

Well not so fast! We must first create timeless, quality content that anybody can relate to- not just bloggers. Understandably, personal blogs are like an open diary but please don’t make it all about you, me, myself and I. There are ways to incorporate talking about yourself all the time to other places, people and things.

SEO, Tech and Make Money Online (MMO) bloggers’ mantra is all about SEO or search engine optimization. They give all kinds of tips on how to increase your ranking in Google or how to have your site show up in Google pages with the ultimate aim of eventually landing on the first page of Google search and even be number one on the list for that particular keyword. All those are good advice. The bottomline however is QUALITY CONTENT. Would you believe me if I say I never worked on my SEO for my blog name yet this blog appears on page one of Google when you type “Sinigang” and this is not even a food or recipe site blog?! Even moreso when you type “Sinigang blog,” I appear in 5 of the 10 links on page one of Google search. “Sinigang for the Soul” is a given as it is too specific to my blog, all 10 links refer to my site.

You can do everything and anything to increase your PageRank or ranking in searches or you can focus on one thing: improving your content! In the end, content is king! It’s true, that’s all I did. Except for joining various social networks already mentioned above, I never did anything special to make this blog or MOST of my articles appear on Google.

When I took a vacation early this year, I was in and out of blogging for 3 months. In April, I only had 1 post! Surprisingly, I was still getting the same traffic more or less as though I was actively blogging! That goes to show that I have at least some decent content that people are reading with or without recent activity. That doesn’t mean I could stop blogging and be gone for months again! That just means that I have to continue creating articles that can be read or re-read today, six months from now and two years later and still be relevant to a reader.

Please continue here for the second part. The article has gotten really long- I had to splice it. Happy annniversary to this blog!

I moved to WordPress end of December last year and have my first taste of upgrade from WordPress 2.3.1 to 2.3.2. I didn’t know how I did it but it was smooth. In February this year came the next change to 2.3.3 and in March for WordPress 2.5. Ok, here I’m a little bit complaining because in April there was the 2.5.1 update.

July came and yet another update with version 2.6. This is I think the only version upgrade where I really felt the difference in my blogging experience with WordPress! I just love the Restore, post revisions option. It has saved my a** a few times because sometimes I put a lot of coding in my post or just write a bunch of nonsense as draft and accidentally delete some paragraphs in the process. With the post revisions, you could retrace your old saved post by the hour and day you’ve made the changes and get to compare your revisions and you can restore the post!! Then it has the Shift gears/ Turbo button where it supposedly hastens your and your reader’s browsing experience. I have yet to notice the difference but every time I log in, I click that Turbo button anyway. Another nifty feature is word count! I tend to type a lot of words!! I really like that I can track them and know when to stop!

The only new feature I don’t like with WP 2.6 is the image caption. I’d love to be able to put a caption on my images sure! but it doesn’t seem to allow floating placement on either right or center. It always justifies the image on the left and the text doesn’t float around it. You can tell from my example!! Hey, this thing actually works now!! Don’t know what happened, the caption stopped working altogether. I didn’t edit so you’ll see what I mean…

Ok. I just installed 2.6.1 in August 15. Now, my dashboard is saying I need another upgrade to 2.6.2!! In 8 months, we have had to upgrade six times with WordPress! Come on! I maintain numerous sites and remember I have to do it for each!!

Solution

So I finally went to get myself the WORDPRESS AUTOMATIC UPGRADE PLUGIN hoping to lessen the time it takes me to do the upgrade from the backend via the cPanel and instead with the promised 5-step upgrade of this plug-in I can do it without leaving my WordPress account. So I did.

It actually took more than 5 steps to accomplish the upgrade via the plugin and it pretty much took me the same amount of time to do it from the back end. The only difference is, it is more convenient to save a back up of the files and database using the plugin than the cPanel because it automatically suggests backup in the steps. So I’m keeping this automatic upgrade plugin and will be using it on my other sites! Below are samplings on what you will see in your dashboard while doing the automatic upgrade plugin. This is in no order as I thought I will be doing 5 steps, it turned out to be more than five.

Good luck with updating your WordPress blogs. See if the WordPress Automatic Plugin works for you! Until the next update, 2.7 and so on…!

If you’re a blogger, you are probably using one or the other or in my case- both: Copyscape and Creative Commons. I have decided to tackle the subjects after receiving an anonymous comment on my previous post about the two (I am inimical to anonymous comments!! You have a name, for crying out loud use it!). It was an irrelevant note, from (I assume) a blogger with a Philippine IP address who just sort of ‘ordered’ me:

“You can not use copyscape and Creative Commons at the same time. Copyscape goes against sharing which is what Creative Commons is all about. search Free Culture Movement, open source, GPL, linux, IBM, Creative Commons are all part of the movement, copyscape is not because it is against it.”

Aaah, yeah… Nevermind the syntax! Earth calling nameless person! Aside from the fact that your comment was totally unrelated to my post, you have no idea what you’re blabbering about. Your comment is an absolute farce and the arguments totally neither here nor there. But thanks to you, I now have a blog post!

Copyscape is against sharing? You seriously need to have someone translate what you have been reading because your interpretation of the concept is out of this world! You are insinuating that Copyscape is THE bad guy because it doesn’t allow COPYING, STEALING or your term to put it subtlety, sharing. Your comment rather reads that you are talking “sharing” to actually mean copying or stealing as one and the same! By saying that, you are suggesting that Creative Commons is part of the movement that tolerates stealing or copying! Do you seriously believe that?

For the benefit of the lost confused nameless person, let me share what I know on the subject. To quote Bob Edwards, “a little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.” I beg your indulgence as this post could get lengthy but I sure hope you will learn something from it.

Clearly I claim to be no expert on this but reading with understanding on Copyright, Copyscape and Creative Commons can go far. This is not rocket science! Some people just don’t “get it” (pun intended!) and that’s all right. I don’t get most things. However, there is more, much more to just copying and pasting the Copyscape and Creative Commons buttons to place on our blogs.

See most bloggers find the buttons, thinks it’s cool, copies the code and then that’s that. That’s not how it works! I know why I placed these banners on my website! There’s no excuse why one doesn’t know the purpose of it on their websites.

WHAT IS COPYSCAPE?

Copyscape is a TOOL.

It is not some kind of law or rule. It is not an agenda or part of any “movement”. It is just like any other BUSINESS website promoting something, in this case it is promoting a service to find duplicates of your content to protect you against online plagiarism and theft. Plain and simple. There have been contentions about its usage, purpose and usefulness because it is only afterall dependent on Google’s API- meaning it’s just the same as typing in keywords in Google as Copyscape uses the same database, therefore you get the same results!!

On the Copyscape website you are greeted with a search bar just like Google’s that says: “Search for copies of your page on the Web.” Half of the time, you get useless results because it does find ALL duplicates regardless if it’s just snippets of your own submission to MyBloglog, BlogCatalog, Technorati and other networking sites or quotes and references you made from other sites. It couldn’t tell the difference on what’s plagiarized or not- just duplicates of anything.

Since it is dependent on Google’s algorithms, it only shows you the latest popular and most recent duplicates it could find. What happens if the ones plagiarized are your posts from a year before that is not too popular? You’re doomed. Of course I wouldn’t know what happens when you get the premium service, how reliable the results will be extending your searches to limitless as opposed to just 10 free. I have no interest in paying $0.05 per search (Premium service) to find out if other people stole any of my articles or not. There are other ways to know for FREE.

COPYSCAPE DOES NOT PREVENT PLAGIARISM AND THEFT CONTENT!

Whoever gave one the idea that it does baffles the mind. Copyscape is only a duplicate detecting service with limitations. It won’t even help you if indeed you found your article stolen! It gives advice on what to do if your work is plagiarized and it has a forum to share issues. That’s that. Tough luck, we’re on our own! There is NO full-proof tool that can ever prevent theft content. Fortunately, there are OTHER tools you can use to detect it (and I will tell you in another post later) BUT again no way to STOP these lowlifes from stealing or scraping our content.

Why the heck am I using it for then if its useless? When I first discovered the service last year, I actually found one lowlife who stole one of my popular contents and it’s been sitting on his blog since 2005!! He argued that he found it circulating via email with no attribution! I wrote a short fiction “Unrequited Love” in April 2005 on my Friendster blog, he copied it in May 2005. I only discovered it in November 2007 and without Copyscape, I wouldn’t have probably known!! It was the only time Copyscape delivered for me…

Nonetheless, I choose to use the service despite its limitations because on the good side, it really helped bring the issue of PLAGIARISM to the forefront. They helped bring theft content into the mainstream and brought certain degree of awareness to everyone. They are continuously (although excessively I might add) praised by the media for their “valuable” work. Well, to get the full benefit you have to pay, how does that become valuable to an average Jane and Joe like me?!!

With the Anti-plagiarism banner up on all my pages, it does set off a warning to would be thieves- regardless if they choose to ignore it not, it’s there! It is my way of challenging these losers: “C’mon, try stealing my content and I will HUNT YOU DOWN to the depths of the internet and I will expose you!! I will not stop!” Hosting sites, Google and social networking sites HATE content stealer with a passion and they don’t want to be associated with one! Reporting it to them is a slow process but it is totally worth all the effort!! Copyscape is not a stand alone tool. When used with other tools can be beneficial to every blogger.

Scrapers are another issue because they may come in bulk and so are harder to track down. Scrapers steal content automatically via our RSS feeds based on the keywords used. When you get to their sites, they don’t actually have any original posts but all snippets of different links to websites with the same keyword.

WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS?

Creative commons (CC) is again an optional service!

It is derived from a non-profit organization based in the United States that “encourages authors and other creative people to donate selected writings, music, video, and other works for free exchange in the public domain.”

This is done to facilitate ease of use of certain materials found online. It supposedly shortens the process of going through USING certain materials online like asking permission to the author to use a photo or copy certain lines on a website. What it has done however, despite very good intentions has them becoming a part of the problem instead of the solution because MOST people do not understand the concept and or HOW TO USE IT like the nameless person! CC can only work when people understands how to use and apply it.

Creative Commons is a new copyright law.

BIG NO. Creative Commons does not and can never replace the copyright law. It is not some kind of new law!! Fact is, “Creative Commons license are based on copyright. So it applies to all works that are protected by copyright law. The kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings, for example.”

Creative Commons is anti-copyright.

Again, not. It is even debated to be PRO-copyright! “Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright—including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing—nor do they give you the ability to control anything that is not protected by copyright law, such as facts and ideas.”

HOW DOES CREATIVE COMMONS WORK?

I have CC on my site (see footer): Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0. It means that you are FREE to use my work: Free to Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

There it is clear as the sky in Boracay Islands on a sunny day! I am authorizing anybody to use any of my content as is PROVIDED you give me credit! You give me a linkback, cite my website as your source. You can NOT use my work to earn money off it! And you can NOT change or transform it into anything.

Say, you liked my short story: “Unrequited Love.” Go ahead cut and paste it on your website but include on the top or bottom CREDIT that it is a repost and the original can be found on MY site! It becomes plagiarism when you cut and paste the story with no attribution that anybody who sees and reads it thinks it’s your original work when it’s not. You can not MAKE my short story and turn it into a novel (derivative work) using the entire plot and characters and the story itself and then have it published as a book and sell it (non-commercial use)!! You don’t need written permission to use any articles on my website! When you link to me, I would know.

That’s the short of Creative Commons, to cut down the process of asking permission and waiting for a response from the original author. With the button on your site, you can dictate it to be ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, SOME RIGHTS RESERVED, ETC making it easier for users to identify which works are readily available for reuse which ones are not. For the long story please visit creativecommons.org and read carefully what they have to say.

Creative Commons does not deter Copyright Infringement, Theft Content

The same as Copyscape, CC regardless of how you want your work used does not prevent one from stealing your content. Content thieves are the lowliest of lifeforms, they have no respect for signs, warnings or banners! They would use our content with or without our consent!

Copyright Law is SUPREME.

This is the be all and end all of it.

Copyright SUPERSEDES ALL related tools or services or organizations or whatever movement. Everything is based on the copyright law. Whether it is Copyleft, Copyscape, Creative Commons, GNU, Free Culture Movement, Open Source, GPL, Linux, IBM, Fair use Act. All these websites except one even have copyright notices plastered at the bottom of their pages. Everything has limits.

Let me lay it down this way to give you a better perspective:

Name of website/service/tool/movement  |  Year of Inception

Free Culture Movement April 2004

Libervis.com August 2004

Open Source Initiative 1998

GNU 1984

Linux 1994

Creative Commons 2001

Philippine Copyright Law RA 8293 June 6, 1997

International Copyright Law Berne Convention 1887

ETC…

What’s my point? The Copyright law has been in existence for hundreds of years over a hundred years! You can’t question this law, you can’t run away from it. One cannot circumvent or evade the copyright law! The ownership of any work in whatever form is protected by copyright UNTIL the person FREELY gives up that right!! It is the owner’s prerogative!! If one wants to distribute his work for free, I commend that person! In fact here’s one amazing popular blogger who defies convention. He authorizes anybody to steal his content! Go for it!

Conclusion

When you start saying that one thing goes against sharing so you can’t use it, then something is obviously lost in translation there. No one can dictate what one shares with another. Everybody has the right to their own work until they voluntarily give up that right! You can’t share something that you have NOT given freely! No movement dictates people to giveaway their work, they can only hope for it.  If you don’t share, that’s your choice. These movements will NOT condemn you if you don’t want to share your work with others!

Nowhere does it say in the Creative Commons site that THEY ORDER PEOPLE TO SHARE THEIR WORK. Creative Commons encourages all publishers to let other people know HOW THEY WANT THEIR WORK USED!! That’s why CC gives you 6 choices plus combinations!

1. Attribution alone (by)
2. Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
3. Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
4. Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
5. Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
6. Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

These choices vary from ALL rights reserved to some rights reserved with variations. (Sorry, I don’t like repeating myself either!)

IMHO, I am impartial to the EXTREME Free Culture notion because its core principles if you analyze it directly or indirectly supports the idea of communism rather than democracy. They want to be able to break down technology into pieces and distribute it to however they want, which is great to me! It benefits me too when I am able to download this theme for example FREE of charge or the FREE WP-plugins because of GPL and open source. It promotes common ownership, a free society to copy, distribute and whatever you bloody well please with software or any digital technology. One person gives up his/her own right to months long of hardwork, that is fine. That is his/her decision to make. We’re thankful to those people.

The line is drawn somewhere but some extreme advocates want to be able to cross that line too! For the most part, some movements are after the BIG FISH- big corporations raking in TOO MUCH money for a software they have invented. They want to somehow be able to use it and integrate it to their own invention making the technology free for all.

The whole idea of free culture is very open to misinterpretations and misuse and it is a scary thing for artists and creative people whose ideas and hard work are stolen because of it. Like the nameless person’s farce reasoning, unscrupulous individuals will use it as an excuse to copy and steal original works by others.

For the ignorant street smarts, they use free culture as a weak point to freely share and distribute software justifying it their right to do so. That is called PIRACY NOT SHARING. Big difference. One is a criminal act, the other fostering community. Creative Commons and others will never endorse sharing to mean copying without consent from the original author. Still others steal content and argue that the original authors should be “flattered” because they used their content. Poor argument. If you wanted to give adulation to the original author, wouldn’t linking back to the original post make more sense as a thank you?!

Common sense is not too common these days…

If my own blabbering still didn’t help and you are still confused, please read all the links here or feel free to have an open friendly discussion with me.  My only request is you give me your name. I give you mine.

Note: To all Friendster users who are not WordPress Bloggers and are confused with how to use the new blogging platform, email me with your questions via Contact (on the top right of this page) or leave a comment- perhaps I can help! You can ask me anything at all regarding how to use WordPress blog in Friendster! Hear from you soon!

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I couldn’t believe it! I just got finished writing my newest post on my Friendster blog, updating this and that on my profile and then came the biggest surprise!

SUDDENLY, without any warning or any sign at all- my Friendster blog magically transformed into a new website!! A WordPress website!!

CRAP, all my sidebar except for the comments and recent entries- gone!! I just updated my blogroll, added new links- it’s all gone!! All the HTML codes and whatever else on my sidebar- gone!!

How can Friendster do this without alerting its users?? I immediately Googled for news, anything that says about the “merger.” Nada. Zilch. I looked at their Help section, it still covers Typepad blog stuff. I went to WordPress.com/.org- still nothing there. Is this just experimental? Am I dreaming all this? If I wake up tomorrow, will it return to its old format?!

I really should be happy with this huge move by Friendster. Here I was ranting about Friendster’s lame platform for a long time- the very reason why I moved to Blogger and eventually WordPress because of its makeup and now, like going full circle, I may decide to actually maintain the friendster site just because it is now using WordPress.

I haven’t opened my Friendster profile in almost a year!! In part because I was having problems logging in. Then I got busy with life and for the most part, I got busy blogging in Blogger and WordPress!! Then, today- this hour- I was finally able to log into my account. I am not even done updating everything yet and they changed the entire platform without freaking telling us ahead!!!

THIS IS HUGE. Could it mean that we could finally place advertisements, Google adsense, etc. to our Friendster blog? It has widgets, WP-admin, dashboard and plugins, everything wordpress is there- except being able to tweak the theme design!! Still, the possibilities are exciting!!

I have not explored all the features yet, or as to how far we can go tweaking the dang thing but so far, it looks like you could place whatever it is you want to place like Blogger only better because it is WORDPRESS!! Get it? WordPress.com doesn’t let you place ads on your blog if it’s hosted by them- only when you host your site yourself can you have limitless freedom to the site. Blogger lets you do whatever you want with your Blogger site but then its features are still limited compared with WordPress. Here with Friendster blog you have the power of Blogger and WordPress combined!!

I’m happy yet angry at Friendster for this lousy transition. I’m still pretty shocked on the implications so we’ll see. For now, I gotta go!! I have to play with my Friendster blog some more, change my theme, add widgets!! I don’t even know where to begin! Geez! Maybe you’ll see me there often now- I don’t know, it’s crazy!

UPDATE: Dream on, dream on… Of course, it doesn’t allow Google adsense!! It was wishful thinking on my part that Friendster would actually allow us to place Google adsense on our site! The good news is Friendster doesn’t seem to be adding THEIR own Google adsense on the blog either. At least they’re NOT trying to make money off us anymore with our own writings!!

It doesn’t seem to allow script/javascript. Adsense uses such but so does Entrecard! HTML is fine. You can place that. I tried adding Project Wonderful ad just copied and pasted from this site. It seem to accept it. I won’t know for sure and I don’t think I want to add it on that site anyway…

OK, will someone from the Philippines let me know if you have the WordPress feature? I’m not seeing any changes at all with other sites!! WHY?!

THIS IS FREAKY: I found out that I now have two URLS for my Friendster blog. The first has MY OLD original theme and everything else that is in the Typepad format and the new one I’m talking about with WordPress on it! There seems to be no way to edit or access the OLD original blog but perhaps Friendster decided to keep it? I’m more confused now than I ever was a few hours ago!! Is someone on the same boat as I am?

Will keep you posted for more.

Please let me know if you find other features available or not avialable with Friendster WordPress. Thanks!