Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty
Blog Action Day 2008 happens this October 15 and the topic is poverty. Exactly what is it?
Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.
Here’s a promotional video:
This year’s topic is especially close to Filipino hearts, so I’m sure a lot of bloggers from the Philippines will be participating. Be sure to join as well!
Write about Cinderella and win Lea Salonga goodies
As the Philippine version of Cinderella launches, the Lea Salonga Fans Club is sponsoring a blogging contest. Here are the prizes:
First prize: $100, plus Cinderella soundtrack album (the one that Lea and cast are recording in Manila) and original US-made DVD copies of The Making of Miss Saigon and Hey, Mr. Producer! (Not familiar with the latter? Here.)
The two co-finalists will receive the same package minus the $100 cash prize.
Everyone else who participates will also get a chance to win something, with more copies of the Cinderella soundtrack album and DVDs to be raffled off.
The best part is that Lea Salonga herself will pick the top three entries. The contest duration is the same as the schedule of Cinderella: July 29 to August 24. Winners will be announced by the week of August 25th.
Tip: create a blogging workflow
Chris Brogan writes that keeping up a steady blogging pace is no easy task, so you need to be ready with goals, tasks, tools that can help you out when that “blog drought” comes.
See what makes the front page of Digg.com (or your industry’s most likely haunt) - learning by emulating is an important blogging skill. Don’t be a clone, but if you pick up some tricks from writers you come to admire, all the better.
The article contains lots of excellent tips for those who still haven’t quite kept up with their blogging routines. It’s useful for amateur and professional bloggers alike.
Photography, Creative Writing and Videography Talk
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Bonifacio High Street is sponsoring a talk on photography, creative writing, ande videography on June 24, 7:00 pm.
Speakers will be Ocs Alvarez in photography, Dean Alfar in creative writing, and Mike Cabardo in videography.
To get into this event, leave a comment here. Only 60 slots are available.
Tip: Write in Fullscreen Mode in WordPress 2.5
Still not convinced about switching to WordPress 2.5? Here’s another great feature that might change your mind. While writing a post, you can now block out all the distractions by shifting to fullscreen mode!
Note: you have to use the Visual Editor for this to work. Just click on the icon that looks like a computer screen or hit ALT+SHIFT+G and you have a screenful of writing space instantly! Gone are the days when you have to grab a specialized text editor like WriteRoom or Dark Room just to remove all the unnecessary elements hindering you from writing that million-dollar blog post.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a “content suggestion engine for blogging”. Just write a blog post as you normally would and eventually Zemanta suggests relevant links, articles, images, and tags. Needless to say, this is a really convenient and innovative way to help bloggers with their posts.
It currently works with WordPress and Firefox, as well as other blog platforms like Blogger and TypePad. Here’s a video demo of Zemanta for a WordPress blog:
Zemanta Wordpress Plugin Teaser from zemanta on Vimeo.
You can also check out a demo at their website. Why not download and install Zemanta and try it out for yourself?
Get Your Message Across Clearly, Whether You’re a Blogger or a Beauty Queen
For many of us, communicating in English is not just an option but a requirement. Is it because more people can understand us when we speak that way? Or is it because we appear to be more intelligent and more successful?
Whether you’re writing a blog post or answering a question in the Binibining Pilipinas pageant, it is more important that what you say makes sense.
Our priority should not be to speak in a language that makes us look better, but in a general method that communicates our ideas more clearly. The choice of language is just part of that.
How do you get your message across clearly? Although this list is generally aimed at bloggers, you’ll see that it applies to anybody who wants to reach out to a group of people, large or small. Yes, even beauty queens.
Find your target audience. What is your blog about? Which types of visitors will find your blog interesting? Your target audience will help you figure out the tone, length, frequency, and depth of your blog posts. If you crack a certain joke, will they find it funny? If you write about a new topic, will they still understand it, much less comment on it? This is why surveys, polls, and statistics are very important; they give a very good idea of who you’re dealing with so that you can better prepare for it next time. (Beauty pageant metaphor: Find your strength and play it up. Remember that you’ll have to appeal to many different audiences too: your hometown crowd, the foreign crowd, and the judges.)
Organize your thoughts. At the heart of blogging is writing, and if you don’t know the basics of building around a main idea with the different techniques you’ve learned in school, better brush up on that. Form an outline of what you want to say, then expound on it. (Beauty pageant metaphor: This is especially difficult since you have zero preparation time for the questions you’ll be asked. Think fast, don’t stumble on your words.)
Keep it simple, keep it real. Don’t use complicated words or excessive paragraphs just to give others the illusion that you’re the expert. People are considered smarter when they can turn complex ideas into really simple-looking ones. And if you’re not that smart, don’t even try to cover that up; your audience will figure that out sooner or later. (Beauty pageant metaphor: Need I say more?)
Protect Your Most Valuable Blog Resource, Stop Content Scraping and Plagiarism
There’s a very popular saying amongst bloggers, and it goes: content is king. As a blogger, your content is your most precious resource. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to let sploggers and feed scrapers take that away from me. Not if I can help it. Not if you can help it. How?
Label your feeds with copyright notices.
Add your name, website, and URL (site URL or post URL) to your feed so that when it is read elsewhere, others will know where it really came from.
Recommendation: FeedEntryHeader Plugin. Many feed customization plugins exist, but I like this particular plugin because it affixes the necessary information before the content of the post rather than after, as feed scrapers usually truncate the content. And if you can help it, spell out the URL in plain text to your website or blog post rather than link to it using HTML. Scrapers will definitely want visitors to think they didn’t steal someone else’s content.
Feedback: Do you use summaries instead of full feeds because you don’t want scrapers to access them? Or do you provide both?
Block questionable visitors.
If they can’t find your blog, they won’t be able to take advantage of it.
Recommendation: AntiLeech Plugin. This plugin ideally stops potential scrapers from accessing your website content and instead feeds them fake content. You can enter either IP addresses or User Agent strings that identify the scrapers. Read more about AntiLeech here.
The tricky part is figuring out who your enemy is. They will have to scrape your feed first for you to know about it, right? You can use ©Feed to figure out who is reading your feeds, but more often than not they actually send trackbacks to your post once they’ve scraped it, so you can get their IP address from that as well.
Feedback: Where do you find your IP address blacklists?
Disable hotlinking.
Hotlinking is a term that describes how other people use your content with your own server bandwidth, which is how much data your server transfers over a period of time. Every time someone loads your website, all those files that get loaded is equal to a certain bandwidth. So if people keep hotlinking your photos, music, or videos, your bandwidth quota for the month (or quarter or year) gets used up. Now hotlinking may not be an issue for you—if you have lots of bandwidth, and don’t care about attribution or who uses your content. Normally it is; it’s bad netiquette. If you do care, you need to stop people from hotlinking.
Recommendation: Hotlink Protection Plugin. Enter the file location which you want to protect, and if an external website loads any image from it, a different image will be displayed (which is customizable). Since images are the most common target anyway, this plugin will suffice.
Feedback: Do you host your own images or do you hotlink them from sites like PhotoBucket?
*Note: What the plugins can accomplish can also be done in less straightforward but more flexible methods like PHP programming, .htaccess editing, cPanel configuration, web applications.
Take action.
Protecting your content isn’t just about setting up defense mechanisms. You should be vigilant enough to find out if you’ve been scraped or plagiarized and then do something about it.
Recommendation: 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft. These are six long and tough steps, but if you value your work, you will be thankful when it gets you through:
- Detection
- Preserving the Evidence
- Contact the Plagiarist (if Practical)
- Contacting the Advertisers (optional)
- Contacting the Host
- Contacting the Search Engines
Feedback: Do you think Filipino bloggers stand a chance in a battle against plagiarism, with all these (US-biased) steps that need to be accomplished?
Feedback: Do you know that Creative Commons Licenses like the CC Attribution 3.0 License have been ported to play nicely with Philippine copyright laws?
Sugod mga kapatid!
Right now, fighting plagiarism especially in the form of sploggers and scrapers is very tedious. Hopefully things get easier in the future, but for now, at least we stand a very good chance against it.
