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.
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8. I learned that Decathlete Bryan Clay of the United States is the world’s greatest athlete but nobody gives a S***t about him. If your name is Michael Phelps however, the whole world practically knows who you are and you’re set for life! You get to have multi-million dollar contracts, appear on cereal boxes for the next 3 years, endorse products left and right, and kids would call you their hero. Still, others would even claim you are the world’s greatest athlete when you can only do one sport!!

7. I learned no question that Michael Phelps is the world’s greatest swimmer today! He has the most number of medals than any other swimmers in history or any other athlete period! He managed to surpass, Mark Spitz’ 7 Olympic Gold medals and now has 14 Olympic Gold medals total! He holds 7 world records up for challenge in 2012!

6. I learned that in Women’s Gymnastics, you can land on your knees in the Vault and still get a Bronze medal!! You can even be in a tie and lose the Gold, despite the fact that your opponent had more visible errors than you!! How can one explain judging errors in the Olympics?!
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Hi. My name is Mae (Hi, Mae!) and I’m a Search Addict! The 12-step program does not apply in this case because I don’t want to recover from it.

I’m most fascinated with Google specifically as a search engine- its seemingly limitless power over the internet and how they came to be. Google has 100 and so products available and some of their notable services include: Gmail, Google Checkout, Picasa, YouTube, Google Gears, Blogger, Search, Adsense, Adwords, Apps, Docs, Gadgets, Lively, Knol, Orkut, Reader, Alerts, Base, Analytics, Goog-411, Friend Connect, Jaiku, Feedburner, iGoogle, and Google earth. The average internet user probably avail of at least 5 Google products! I use 11! How many Yahoo! do you use? I use 3!

In such a short time, they have become a global phenomenon that anyone who has access to the internet knows what or who Google is. In time, it will equate or even surpass iconic names like Coke (Coca-cola) and Kodak- the two being the most famous brand names in the world. Even in the most remote areas, in the outskirts of Asia to the borders of South Africa- people know Coca-Cola (Koka Kona)!

This fascination often leads to frustration as I become more and more dependent to this demi-god. They continuously dominate search and come as the number one search provider in the US commanding 62% share of the pie, according to the latest 2008 Neilsen Online Report. Yahoo comes in second with only 17.5%. Huge, huge difference!

ENTER SCOUR!
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Or is it too early to pass judgment?! I decided to try out Cuil (pronounced as cool) today. After over a week since going live online, I figured it’s the perfect time to check it- now that the hype has died down. I am extremely disappointed.

In case you have not heard the buzz, Cuil is a new search engine, supposedly bigger, better and more intelligent than Google search or any other search engines combined! It sounds like a really promising venture since the brains behind the site are former Google top employees and from other high profile companies. In its first 48-hours it boasted about 50 million searches from all over the world, not bad for a start-up company; Google apparently handles about 3 times more (150 million?!) searches per day.
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When I finally made the move from Blogger to Selfhost Wordpress in late December last year, I took a leap of faith that I could do it! I knew nothing about terms like HTML, CSS, FTP, MySQL databases, cmod, php, MyAdmin, .htaccess and plugins. But I was committed to learn them.

Once settled, I could not believe how much was in store for me in my new ‘home!’ It seem to have opened a whole new door of interest for me- coding. While I’m in the very least NOT an expert of it, I think I know enough to get me through creating decent sites for me and for my other undisclosed network. I still don’t get most of it and I think I’m only lucky getting things right by trial and error. Still.

I now understand why “code is poetry” in Wordpress. The infinite usage of loops, strings, quotes, tags, divs and ul-li is almost like metrical forms in verses that means something imaginative and that creates beautiful results.

My first WP theme was Helios, very basic and simple. A good start off point along with OrangeSense at my other site, The Postcard Collector. About the same time I started blogging, I also created a homepage for a small Restobar I co-own in the Philippines named Tatay Pepe’s. It was an even simpler design and there was nothing much to it at all. I finally got sick looking at it and decided it was time to reinvent the website.

The hunt for a theme was on and I found a great one in Arthemia theme. What a premium quality template given away for free! But that’s not even the amazing part. It’s the designer! Free as it is, he patiently takes time answering each and every repetitive questions regarding install and coding. He is almost at the beck and call of every blogger who decides to use the theme!

It took me 2 days to have the site up and running! It was a pain to install only because my knowledge to WP coding is still limited yet I didn’t need to disturb the theme creator! I managed to decipher everything myself. I’m loving the whole process of discovering something new with Wordpress- unleashing its power and pushing its potentials.

Just over two weeks old in Wordpress, on to my new theme- it jumped from 9million or so Alexa rank down to 1.3million Alexa ranking! Impressive! It did manage to have a PageRank of 2, ten months after I bought the domain.

Just over two weeks old and it is already nominated for Filipino Blog of the Week over at a fellow blogger’s site who is an ‘authority’ himself to blogging. Kindly Visit Tatay Pepe’s.com, stay awhile and vote for the site please… Would you also let me know what you think of it?  

Tatay Pepe’s is my poetry at the moment.

What am I up to now?!

I’ve been seeing the ad of this website for quite sometime and I didn’t really pay much attention. Don’t know why all of the sudden I decided to check it out.

The concept is intriguing enough that after a quick read, I wanted to be a part of it! The idea is to collect a list of 1 million blogs. It is an experiment knowing that according to Technorati, there are 70,000,000 blogs in existence and growing every day, perhaps every minute!

The real challenge for this website however is HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE them to reach the 1 millionth blog! I just finished listed mine and I’m on number 1,838. It seems they are a ways to go but my guess is that it would take them years and years to reach the million blog mark.

The website was conceived April 10th, 2008. It took me over two months to find it. If they average out about a thousand mark every month, then it will only be 12,000 blogs in one year. A million divided by 12,000- you get an outrageous time frame and we’ll all probably be dead to see it reach the millionth mark basing it on their current rate!

Nonetheless, given that right now there are millions of blogs on the internet, if they could double or triple their goal every month, maybe we can see the day they reach 1 million blogs. I’m listing my other blogs to it so that should help ad up.

Are you up for the ‘game’ or you think this is too impossible to accomplish that it’s futile to join? What’s your take?

Ringo.com (PageRank 6, Alexa rank 2,683), the US based online photo and video sharing con social networking site is ending its services soon. I could very well see why! There’s not enough there to survive in the social networking world that’s Myspace (PR 8, Alexa 6), Friendster (PR 7, Alexa 41) and Facebook (PR 9, Alexa 7) territory. Their traffic is not comparable and way below that of the big 3. Not even to that of smaller sites like Linkedin (PR 8, Alexa 201), Bebo (PR 7, Alexa 109), MyYearbook (PR 6, Alexa 832), Orkut (Google site, No PR set, Alexa 2), Tagged (PR 6, Alexa 192), etc.

I am a member but let’s see, when was the last time I logged in? Last check, it was over a year ago! The only reason I joined was that some friends invited me there. I never really did anything other than post a photo or two. I haven’t even been back on my Friendster account in 8 months! In Facebook, in 3 months or so. I am a member of other social networks like Multiply (PR 6, Alexa 148), Xanga (PR 7 Alexa 231), Wayn (PR 6, Alexa 852), and Shelfari (PR 6, Alexa 12,115) (and I don’t see the need for a Myspace account!). haven’t been to those sites lately either. How your interests change over the course of time.

There are hundreds more social network sites out there and it’s not going to slow down anytime so long as people have that need to belong somewhere- social networks will be there. Sadly, the quality, social responsibility and integrity of some of these sites have degraded. The environment has become a mere popularity contest. What has become of some are shallow, empty, narcissistic, judgmental if not antagonistic sites.

As for Ringo, the company will be all right. They’re the same group who owns Monster.com and Tickle.com. They will just venture on to other areas. I remember Yahoo Photos closing its site a year ago which was fine as they also own the giant Flckr- that photo sharing site.

Ringo will officially close on June 30, 2008. They just added a feature that will allow users to download back the photos stored in the account. So if you have a profile with them, save your photos by logging on before the closing date.

Please take time to answer the short poll I have on the sidebar. I just changed my template, and still playing  with the layout and desing. I don’t think I’ll be putting a poll for the time being. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the week!

As if I don’t have enough widgets on my blog, I found another handy blog tool that I couldn’t resist having. The name is ROMlet.

ROMlet is a three in one widget: a brag badge, bookmarking tool and stats counter- for now. Who knows what other cool features this fresh website has yet to add since starting only a year ago? At a glance it looks as though it is just another blog social networking copycat but wait, there’s much more to it!