collisionbend.com

So the assignment, as I recall, was to list two or three web sites that I, as a local Cleveland blogger, read every day, and later refined to list the two or three you simply couldn’t do without — as if a day without one of them was like a day without sunshine.

OK, here you go:

1. Boingboing — absolutely, positively: if this site were to disappear from the Net, I’d be officially lost.

2. Seth Godin’s Blog — an intelligent guy.

3 (tie). Wired and Slashdot — tech news and lifestyle stuff to keep me abreast of all things cultural, political and lifestyle-oriented.

4 (tie). Lifehacker and Gizmodo — for the gadgeteer in me.

Though not technically a blog, I have to add this site, which has become my Firefox home page at work: Random Shakespearean Sonnet. Delightful stuff.

It does, doesn’t it? I’m laughing my butt off over here!

Here’s the current radar for our area, some more for my mother-in-law to worry about:

I just had some asshat dump 591 pieces of comment spam in my moderation cue. I shut off comments. I placed redirects based on his IP into my scripts. I edited my .htaccess file and banned him from my site.

All of this — to no avail. I think the only thing that slowed him down was Tar Pit, which denies comments that come from the same IP too quickly. I could have had four or five times as many spam comments.

Fortunately, I know a little PHP.

Dreading opening my moderation queue and WordPress‘ nasty clumsiness in handling 500+ comment spams at once (there’s no “Select All” option), I went into PHPMyAdmin and wrote a simple select statement. I brought up all 591 (or so) spam comments and simply deleted them from the database directly.

When I opened my comment moderation queue, I only had a couple from folks that I already know, which I allowed. Took me only a few minutes.

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! I AM A PROFESSIONAL.

Seriously. Don’t do this, because you might screw up and delete the whole thing. Or mung it up so badly that you’ll have to re-install everything — and lose your blog in the process. Before you try to do something like I have just described, CALL SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO DO THIS WITHOUT MUNGING EVERYTHING UP!

I should write a plugin to do this very thing so that you don’t have to worry about it. Hmmmm…

ADDENDUM — I can’t fathom, for the life of me, why some idiot would spam a website that has Comment Moderation turned on. You don’t get the Google juice you seek. You don’t get squat: WordPress keeps everything in the database under wraps until you decide what to show when. All you end up doing is wasting your (and someone else’s) time.

And you know what they say: “Time is Money.”

I’ve decided to take a day off. I can do this, because I have a luxury: my bride can write. She doesn’t think much of her writing, and I’m not sure why when I read something like this in today’s News-Herald. Granted, she’d rather copy edit than write — and a lot of times I would too (this is one of them — and I haven’t changed a thing save for adding a few links into the mix for your benefit, Dear Constant Reader, as some of you might not be from this area).

Here is Laura’s first post on collisionbend.com, written for the readership of her paper, posted here by permission:

EDITOR’S NOTE: I have inserted links into this article for emphasis and instruction; those of you who don’t know that Geauga County, Ohio, gets more snow than almost anywhere east of the Mississippi can now get a hint toward my bride’s humor. One of these days, we’ll cover a hurricane ourselves; that would be grand.

I have to laugh at this (via boingboing).

Hurricane Dennis recently moved into the area, and we have finally had some rain to talk about. Not around me, mind you, but in the Greater Cleveland area. Needless to say, a lot of folks around the Net have been watching the weather. Here are some awesome cloud formation photos, and some more cool weather photos (again, via boingboing).

For my bride. I just hope the weather is better than what we have been experiencing… <grin>

What will they come up with next? Oh, my! I’m going to have to get busy with my iTunes subscription!

Speaking of iTunes, have you heard about the new iFlea (Windows Media video — via Layers Magazine, via Gizmodo)?

Lastly, just what I need to help me quit smoking (via Gizmodo). Yum!

I think, by now, we have all heard about issues facing schools and teachers with the rise of plagiarism with the Internet. Some sites even provide pre-written themes for students on a wide range of topics.

You have to wonder what, exactly, are we teaching our kids these days (Here! Copy this paper and call it your own; you won’t get caught! Besides, you aren’t plagiarizing anything, you’re BUYING this!).

So I don’t know whether to laugh, rage, or cry about this. And this.

Some folks seem to think that an RSS feed (link redacted: the referenced program is no longer available; fair is fair, after all) is free content, regardless of expressed or implied copyright, origin, or intellectual property. They even brag that you shouldn’t ask for distribution rights:

“26. (Show/Hide answer check box) How do I know if I am guilty of copyright infringement when copying content? Should I ask the author?

Checking with an author would be time consuming, and often futile, even if you can find contact information. The copyright laws are quite clear and there is information in the Member area that will guide you through this maze.”

They’ve even taken this a bit farther, folks: they have even issued press releases for their software, even though the folks at prweb have this strict policy against “…false or misleading or which violates any copyright…”:

(iii) no information or copy submitted by USER will contain any content that is obscene, libelous, slanderous or otherwise defamatory, false or misleading or which violates any copyright, right of privacy or publicity or other right of any person…

True, the software itself is legal; what the software does, however, is illegal: it scrapes your RSS feed, removes any and all source attributes leaving only title and content, and then publishes this content as original for another web site, potentially penalizing the original blog at google for duplicated content! If only the folks at prweb could see this distinction: they keep asking me for more information when I explain what is going on here.

But, I digress.

The folks at power-blog.com and superfeedsystem.com bank on the idea that you will not chase after the end user if they get caught using your material. You can bet that if I were to lift something from the Plain Dealer or the St. Petersburg Times, via their RSS feeds, that they would be all over my back — in a heartbeat — for copyright infringement (notice, however, that you are restrained from using content from *their* sites [link redacted: the referenced program is no longer available; fair is fair, after all], with the strongest language available!).

Their logic is simple, if not a tad flawed:

“The reason that an author, news organization or corporation’s content is syndicated is because they want other people to subscribe and post that syndication. If they didn’t want it out on the web, they wouldn’t syndicate it!”

Erm… the reason I publish a feed is to make things easy on my readers, to keep them from wasting precious time wandering to this site when I haven’t posted anything new. In this respect, RSS is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s a broadcast technique, like a commercial. It says, “come on over to my site and read my new content.” It also prevents excessive traffic on my server, helping to keep hosting costs down to a manageable roar. F’rinstance, my overage costs for one month are 160% of my monthly bill, which adds up after a while!

The Unites States Copyright Office has another idea:

§ 102. Subject matter of copyright: In general²⁶:

(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:

(1) literary works…

Uhhh… I think you get the idea by now.

So what’s a self-respecting blogger to do about this? Well, there are three things you can do immediately: 1) limit your RSS feed to excerpts only. This will prevent feed scraping of your original material; 2) start using Copyscape; 3) if you don’t have a copyright listed on your web page, then go get one. A Creative Commons license should be just about enough for the average blog.

If you use WordPress 1.5x, you can do one more thing: Paul at Blog Logic has created a modified wp-rss2.php file which adds the following copyright notice directly to your RSS feed:

“© 2005 (insert your URL here). This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you’re not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you’re looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact (insert your contact details here) so we can take legal action immediately.” Link to the WP script.

Yeah, I know: it adds a bunch of garbage to your RSS feed, it clogs up the networks with all that much more crap, and it makes you weed through more legal mumbo-jumbo — as if you don’t do enough of this on a daily basis already.

The important thing here is that with this, blog scrapers and plagiarists are far less likely to steal your thoughts for their own benefit. They would end up stealing your stuff and telling everyone that they committed a crime as they did it. Elegant.

Yes, I know, now that I have said this, they will come out with software that will scrape any legal disclaimer out of the feed before publication, forcing us to add that same legal shit (yes, I wrote that word in a family-oriented weblog!) to our blog posts, as well.

So, this is my policy on copyright, in effect here at collisionbend:

Copyright © 2004 - 2005 by Will Kessel, www.collisionbend.com. All work posted in this body of work are the sole intellectual property of William Kessel. No person, company or other entity, under any circumstance, shall use any material posted on this website WITHOUT DIRECT CITATION AND A DIRECT RETURN LINK TO THE ORIGINAL SOURCE PAGE. Non-compliance with this rule will be deemed a violation of the Creative Commons Copyright posted on each and every page of this site; violators WILL be prosecuted; no exceptions. If any part of this body of work is used in any medium other than the Internet, proper citation is required, although the return link is not; prior permission is required, however. If you can’t get in touch with me, that’s too damned bad — don’t use the material!

In other words, if I wanted you to have my opinion, I would have given it to you already — go get your own.

Editor’s note: links to the nasty sites in this post were tagged with the ‘rel=”nofollow” ‘ to avoid giving them any kind of Google juice!

I accidentally used the incorrect URL to trackback Eric’s blog… So… One more ping and one more trackback…

I haven’t posted too much at all lately, mostly because I have been trying to get my bathroom finished before my in-laws arrived from New England.

Guess what? No dice: I have everything up, the walls and woodwork and such, but I still have to spackle the remainder and paint, then install the plumbing. I have a ways to go yet.

Then they arrived, just in time for the big holiday weekend, and that set me back. To top it off, my computer came down with a bad case of spyware: my Spybot was old and TV Media was actually blocking its attempts to get updates!

I just downloaded the latest version and all the updates and addons and ran the new program. Somewhere during the last bot check, TV Media started interfering with Spybot as it was going through its system changes; Spybot actually blocked some 15 attempts to change my IE homepage — and eventually ground my system to a halt.

Fotunately, I previously told Spybot to run on bootup. I restarted the system and let Spybot take over. It killed TV Media and freed my system, which is now running along quite cheerfully, with a good bit of returned spring in its step.

I’m overjoyed.

Eric Meyer has asked for folks to ping/trackback his website in this post. I will — gladly.

Eric, consider yourself pinged. Twice. And trackbacked.