Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts

Friday, February 8, 2013

DMCA BLOGGER ALERT: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (And "Spam Blogs," Too)

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DMCA BLOGGER ALERT: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(And "Spam Blogs" To Boot)

ALERT: If you are involved in any aspect of blogging, journalism, publishing, communications, or just happen to own a mobile device which can be unlocked (which would permit you to switch carriers when traveling abroad, or for other reasons), you need to be fully apprised of the DMCA - The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - and its implications for your personal life and business career. You may get one of these on your Blogger dashboard, email, or in the form of a summons. Here's what appeared at the top of my dashboard [yikes!]:



I recently received the associated email which follows. It was sent by Google about one of my posts in The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog which may have contained some material which represented a violation of copyright laws or policies. I simply deleted the post, as I was unable to find the complaint message which cited the nature of my offense by using the suggested Chilling Effects Search Page, which was not functioning earlier today.

Chilling Effects accumulates these DMCA complaint letters, eliminates the identity of the sender (this is sometimes called "sanitization,") and doesn't give you an opportunity to contact, correspond with, or directly confront your accuser - an anonymized complainant.

Here's the content of the letter sent by Google to me:

 Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.

A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_counternotice&product=blogger.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.

If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Affected URLs:

http://madmarketingtactics.blogspot.com/2010/11/slogans-spores-planted-in-consumers.html

Author's Note (1) at 8th February 2013: I have subsequently deleted the "offending post" hyper-linked above (just to avoid expending the time which would invariably be wasted in 1) researching the complaint; 2) determining its validity, and 3) editing the blog post, if necessary) has subsequently been removed.

Author's Note (2) at 8th February 2013: Several weeks ago I was surprised to find that one of my blogs, which had only been posted to once (and that was just a test!) was suspended by Google/ Blogger for possibly being a "spam blog". In the notification, Google stated that the blog might have been suspended in error due to (paraphrased) "certain kinks and quirks in the robotic search which algorithmically makes these determinations and has been known to make errors."

Google's/ Blogger's notification went on to say that if I emailed them at a particular address, they would respond to me within less than a business day with their determination in an email sent to the address of my choice. As a matter of record, I have sent them a total of eight separate requests during the course of the last several weeks, and have never received an acknowledgement, or an email from them. For inquiring minds, here is the text of the notification that Google sent to me [I'm gently sobbing as I relive this moment of horror]:

A SPAM BLOG? THIS CAN'T BE!





Douglas E. Castle for The Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools Blog, and for CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC


*****
















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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Blogging - Choose The Best Blogging Platform (Or Several)

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Entrepreneurs, Webmasters and Bloggers - Which Blogging Platform Is Best For You?

It's an issue that must be addressed: If you sell a product, provide a service, run an e-commerce site or moderate an interactive forum, you have a choice of blogging platforms. These include Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and a number of others.
Blogger is the easiest to use, is completely modularized, but does not offer much in the way of service to SEO and publicize (or to otherwise enrich) your blog and posts. But then, being a cynic, I believe that since Blogger is owned by Google (as are many blogging accessories, applications and tools), that Google might secretly have a bit of extra juice programmed into its ranking algorithm (which is as secret as the Coca Cola recipe) which favors the .blogspot (Blogger) crowd. By the way, here's some interesting trivia -- while I cannot give you the recipe for Coca Cola, I can say that the recipe for Dr. Pepper is identical to the one for Coca Cola, with the addtion of one ingredient -- and that ingredient is prune juice. Hence the unofficial nickname for the beverage: "Dr. Pooper."
Their Blogger templates are limited, they have a knack for freezing up just before you've saved or published your post, so that you must back up your work, and they are not too friendly in terms of snagging graphics, weird fonts and hyperlinks from the other media which you may to choose to copy and paste from. Their "outages" are quite frequent.
WordPress is a bit tougher to use (at first), but it gives you a website-quality blog, with all of the bells and whistles you could want. It will even suggest informational in-text hyperlinks, tags, and connect you seamlessly with social media.
It has many "automatic content enhancers" and helpful tools that make a much fancier blog post quite simple to produce, once you've gotten the hang of using the Wordpress platform. WordPress is ideal for copying and pasting material from other media in direct, "true" form -- this includes everything from website excerpts, graphics, emails, MS Word files, spreadsheets and charts. Blogger does not generally let you embed forms and tables as easily as does WordPress, so you invariably find yourself playing McGyver (however he spells it) and creating workarounds. Some folks like this -- I don't, and I believe that those people who do should either be institutionalized or come to work for TNNWC.

Comments and inbound hyperlinks are much more "attracted" to WordPress, and WordPress has built in tools to encourage more vigorous sharing, forwarding and interaction. WordPress does not have as many "technical timeouts" as Blogger, and it is easier to save and edit your drafts.
I use both Blogger and WordPress. I have toyed around a bit with Typepad, but it seems to be running a distant third in this platform popularity contest, and I am content with my back and forth mix of Blogger and WordPress, at least for the present; then again, it may also be possible that my brain is now at full capacity, and that I don't have any place to store any newly-acquired knowledge intracranially at all.
I am writing this article on WordPress at this time, because Blogger is "having some trouble." Alas. I have copied a recently BLOGGER STATUS chronology (a litany of notifications, apologies, and excuses), starting from today (05.13.2011) on backwards in recent history. I used a clever workaround to accomplish this. I also used the color maroon for angry emphasis...

Blogger Status

Friday, May 13, 2011
We are still at work trying to resolve the issue, and to get things back to normal.
Posted by...
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Posted by Eddie at 12:35 PDT
Monday, May 09, 2011
Blogger will go into read-only mode Wednesday (5/11) 10:00PM PST for about an hour for maintenance.
Update, 10:40PM: The maintenance is complete. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Brett at 21:17 PDT
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
We've identified a problem rendering some blogs containing the popular posts widget. Our engineers are fixing the issue and the it should be resolved shortly.
Thanks for your patience in the mean time.
Posted by Andrew at 01:25 PDT
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Postmortem for Blogger Service Interruption on March 16 By Jinwoo Lee, Blogger Software Engineer.
As we committed to you, when serious service interruptions occur we will provide you details about what went wrong and what we’re doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.
From about 9:55 AM PDT until about 10:20 AM on Wednesday, March 16, all Blogger users were unable to access the Blogger dashboard page at www.blogger.com and draft.blogger.com. No data was lost and Blogspot was not affected at all, so your blog’s readers weren’t impacted.
We made brief status updates on our Twitter accountthis and this. Meanwhile, we kept a close eye on the reports coming through our help forum and Twitter stream.
The problem was caused by human error. We wanted to show a small announcement on the Blogger dashboard and our code for it had a bug, which caused the problem. Once we figured this out, we quickly reverted the change.
We are truly sorry for any inconveniences this might have caused you. In the meantime, we will try harder to make Blogger a more reliable service.
Labels:
Posted by Jinwoo at 10:43 PDT
Monday, October 18, 2010
Image Uploads will be disabled for about two hours while we perform routine maintenance on Wednesday, October 20th at 5:00PM PDT.
We'll update this post as soon as the maintenance is complete.
Update, 6:30PM: This is now complete and uploads are back online. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Brett at 11:21 PDT
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
We're currently working through multiple issues which are affecting the reliability of our comment system. We'll update this post as soon as we have more information to share.
Thanks for your patience in the meantime.
Update: This has been resolved.
Posted by Brett at 12:00 PDT

[Note by Douglas Castle regarding above "Blogger Chronology": Please bear in mind that there are actually numerous mini-outages or short-term catastrophes which occur at least once weekly on Blogger which are not mentioned on the above list. Happily, these are usually mere inconveniences, and will not cause a loss of data or any irreversible damage which will force you to re-post]

Caveat Bloggeur!
----------------
Shameless Promotion:
If you require expert assistance in constructing and managing a richly-featured, search engine optimized, social media integrated, interactive, highly publicized dynamic content-filled blog or blogs for your organization, please fill out the pop-up "Contact TNNWC About A Service" form, and indicate TNNWC BLOGWORKS in the Subject field. They'll dazzle you. Here's the hyperlink for the pop-up form: https://ciof.wufoo.com/forms/id-like-more-information-on-a-service/

We have so much to offer you.
Faithfully,

Douglas Castle
Douglas Castle’s Blogs And RSS Feeds Featured On BLOGGER
For a list of some of the more widely-read blogs on Blogspot as of 1st May, 2011, please click on the RSS icon below:


Recommended topics (selected by WordPress) follow for your additional entertainment and edification:


Could these bulleted items to the right be additional labels, tags, keywords and search terms? Why, I believe that they very well might be...


  • WordPress
  • Blog
  • Blogger
  • Google
  • Typepad
  • Coca Cola
  • Webmaster
  • Microsoft Word
  • Autopsy
  • Blogger in Draft
  • Social Networking
  • Twitter
  • Douglas Castle
  • TNNWC Services
  • TNNWC Blogworks

"TO DO" List:

Read this article on WordPress FREE TOOLS FOR WEBMASTERS AND BLOGGERS at: http://freetoolsforwebmastersandbloggers.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/entrepreneurs-webmasters-and-bloggers-which-blogging-platform/, if you are currently reading this on Blogger (i.e., with the suffix ".blogspot.com") and you may discern some subtle differences between the look of the article on one platform, and the look of the same article on another. I'll confess -- the version on Blogger has a clever picture, which does not appear on the WordPress version.
Douglas Castle’s Blogs And RSS Feeds
For a complete list, click on the RSS icon below:





Powered By TNNWC Group
For complete tactical and strategic business planning, marketing, media, lead-generation, technological and capital resources, scalable solutions and tools to support every entrepreneurial start-up, young enterprise, small- to medium-sized business and emerging high-growth company, talk to The National Networker Companies™/ TNNWC Group, LLC.

We are a collaborative entrepreneurial, creative organization offering you hands-on, personalized assistance in every aspect of achieving your monetization, profitability and financial sustainability objectives, domestically and globally.

We don’t just coach you or offer you pre-packaged, push-button solutions – we listen to you, analyze your exact needs, and work within your budget to: 1) create your tool kit and 2) work as your partner to implement your plan by supporting you in the most efficient and productive use of every tool.

Visit our website, which is located at http://www.TNNWC.com .

To receive our newsletters, publications, information bulletins and alerts, simply join us as a Member. Membership is free and the benefits are unequalled anywhere.

Just go to our home page, and click on the “JOIN US” button.


---------------

Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools - find us at http://BloggingTipsTricksAndTools.blogspot.com
Author: Douglas Castle 

Tags, Labels, Keywords and Terms:blogs, blogosphere, bloggery, blogging, wordpress, typepad, google, plug-ins, word clouds, tag clouds, widgets, gadgets, blidgets, images, free content, RSS feeds, logos, fonts, writing, monetizing your blog, increasing readership, growing a following, citizen journalism, blogs by Douglas Castle, TNNWC Group LLC, Burst Of Brilliance, Braintenance, SEO, search engine optimization, syndicating your blog, increase inbound links, increase backlinks, interactive blogging, surveys, embedding images and forms into blogs, widgetbox, gizmos, blog directories, listing your blog, simple free code, free javascript, adwords, applications, texting, mobile-friendly blogs, pinging, Feedburner, free blogging tools, cooltext effects, guest contributors, your Blogger profile, Syndic8, newsletters, list management, e-commerce, payment processing, disclaimers, the social media connection, re-posting articles, comments, website enhancements, formatting, templates, styles, getting publicity, e-publishing, selling products on your blog, affiliate programs, graphic design, shortening urls, hyperlinking, hyperlurking, building your legend, photos and pictures, embedding code, support services, audience targeting, messaging focus, content is king, sources of content, attribution to authors and publications, cross-posting, x-posting, spinning articles, going public with your blog, newsreels, blog resource section, article titles, flash effects, scrollers, followers lists, copyright information, co-authoring blogs, guest bloggers, hosting, article formatting, switching blogging platforms, the best blogs, researching your topic, mobile blogging, every business needs a blog...

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Blogging With Integrity.

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Blogging With Integrity

Dear Bloggers, Bloggerettes, Blogmeisters, Blogblitzers and Mortals:

The fact is, when you blog with integrity (authenticity, passion, originality, personality and frequency), you will likely attract more readers.

1. Write about what interests YOU.

2. Write about it from your own point of view.

3. Write the way you would speak with a friend -- use your own words (try, however, for more than one syllable per word on the average).

4. If you feel strongly or passionately about your topic, let it out. Rave. Cry. Shout. Denounce. Support. Be emotional. Use your metaphorical heart as well as your wonderful mind. Be a PERSON with a PERSONALITY.

5. Write as frequently as you can. Your articles don't have to be long, but put a gold nugget into each one -- even if the whole post is merely one paragraph in length. Don't let your readers think that you have lost interest in them.

Get blogging!

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle
http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/
http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/douglascastle
http://imagesbydouglascastle.blogspot.com/



Powered By TNNWC Group
For complete tactical and strategic business planning, marketing, media, lead-generation, technological and capital resources, scalable solutions and tools to support every entrepreneurial start-up, young enterprise, small- to medium-sized business and emerging high-growth company, talk to The National Networker Companies™/ TNNWC Group, LLC.

We are a collaborative entrepreneurial, creative organization offering you hands-on, personalized assistance in every aspect of achieving your monetization, profitability and financial sustainability objectives, domestically and globally.

We don’t just coach you or offer you pre-packaged, push-button solutions – we listen to you, analyze your exact needs, and work within your budget to: 1) create your tool kit and 2) work as your partner to implement your plan by supporting you in the most efficient and productive use of every tool.

Visit our website, which is located at http://www.TNNWC.com .

To receive our newsletters, publications, information bulletins and alerts, simply join us as a Member. Membership is free and the benefits are unequalled anywhere.

Just go to our home page, and click on the “JOIN US” button.


---------------

Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools - find us at http://BloggingTipsTricksAndTools.blogspot.com
Author: Douglas Castle 

Tags, Labels, Keywords and Terms:blogs, blogosphere, bloggery, blogging, wordpress, typepad, google, plug-ins, word clouds, tag clouds, widgets, gadgets, blidgets, images, free content, RSS feeds, logos, fonts, writing, monetizing your blog, increasing readership, growing a following, citizen journalism, blogs by Douglas Castle, TNNWC Group LLC, Burst Of Brilliance, Braintenance, SEO, search engine optimization, syndicating your blog, increase inbound links, increase backlinks, interactive blogging, surveys, embedding images and forms into blogs, widgetbox, gizmos, blog directories, listing your blog, simple free code, free javascript, adwords, applications, texting, mobile-friendly blogs, pinging, Feedburner, free blogging tools, cooltext effects, guest contributors, your Blogger profile, Syndic8, newsletters, list management, e-commerce, payment processing, disclaimers, the social media connection, re-posting articles, comments, website enhancements, formatting, templates, styles, getting publicity, e-publishing, selling products on your blog, affiliate programs, graphic design, shortening urls, hyperlinking, hyperlurking, building your legend, photos and pictures, embedding code, support services, audience targeting, messaging focus, content is king, sources of content, attribution to authors and publications, cross-posting, x-posting, spinning articles, going public with your blog, newsreels, blog resource section, article titles, flash effects, scrollers, followers lists, copyright information, co-authoring blogs, guest bloggers, hosting, article formatting, switching blogging platforms, the best blogs, researching your topic, mobile blogging, every business needs a blog...

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