Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In August 2005, I discovered podcasting. I set up a podcast using Blogger (of all things). Maria Speaks was born. I podcasted quite regularly for a while, but have since let things slide. I hope to pick up podcasting again soon. In the meantime, I discovered AudioFeed Creator, which automatically translates all of my blog posts — including this one! — into an audible podcast feed.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

One of the hats I wear is the Webmaster hat for wickenburg-az.com. This is a Web site I started back in 1999 to provide information of interest to Wickenburg residents and visitors. A few years back, I converted it from straight HTML to a blog-based system utilizing WordPress. This makes it very easy to add new content, automatically archives old content by topic, and adds a great search feature.

wickenburg-az.com is a place for folks to share their own content. I have a number of regular contributors, as well as a few folks who just send new content for consideration when they have something to say.

Yesterday, I received two new submissions — a record for a single day. One was a piece by a woman — we’ll call her Jackie — who was deeply offended by something John McCain said in an Interview with Sarah Palin and Katie Couric. She wrote a short article that explained her views. I could tell by reading it that it was something she’d thought about, something that bothered her a lot. She wasn’t a Democrat latching onto yet another Republican faux pas to prove that Republicans weren’t fit to be in office. I got the feeling that she’d been a McCain supporter who felt betrayed by his recent behavior. This comment he’d made was the last straw.

I couldn’t put the article on wickenburg-az.com. Although the site does cover politics, it concentrates on politics at a much more local level. (Heaven knows that the politics in Wickenburg has enough scandal, cronyism, and blatant favoritism to keep us busy.) So I wrote to Jackie, told her that we couldn’t use it, and suggested that she submit it to the newspapers.

Jackie responded to say that she had and that no one seemed interested in printing it. She thanked me for my response — I may have been the only person to extend that simple courtesy.

That got me thinking…I’ve been blogging for nearly five full years now. (My first blog post was on October 15, 2003.) I’ve used my blog to share everything from boring stories from my life to opinions about politics and religion. If I have something to say, I say it here. I don’t try to submit it to newspapers or other Web sites. I have my own publishing outlet and you’re reading it: An Eclectic Mind.

So I wrote back to Jackie and suggested that she start her own blog.

Those of you who think there’s some kind of computer programming knowledge required to start and run a blog are seriously mistaken. If you have the equipment and skills to find and read a blog post on someone else’s blog, you have everything you need to start your own. Best of all, there are plenty of free blogging tools and services out there. My personal favorite is WordPress. Although I use the WordPress server installation, which does require an above average amount of computer know-how, WordPress.com is a free service that just about anyone can use.

Why haven’t I mentioned this before? Well, it’s mostly because I thought everyone already knew this. It wasn’t until I began this e-mail exchange with Jackie that I realized that there are people out there with something to say and no easy public outlet in which to say it. Blogging fills this purpose for me. Why can’t it fill this purpose for others?

Are you someone like Jackie? Someone with something to say to the world and no place to say it? Consider blogging.

And at the risk of turning this into a commercial — which is not my intent — I invite you to check out the free sample lessons from the WordPress.com video I created for the folks at lynda.com. There’s enough there to introduce you to blogging so you can find out whether blogging is for you. There are also free lessons that cover the WordPreess.com setup process. That’ll get you started. WordPress isn’t difficult to use, so there’s a very good chance you won’t even need training material. (But if you do, I can’t say enough nice things about lynda.com materials.)

Blogging has become an important part of my life. It gives me an outlet to communicate what I’m doing and thinking to the world. So what if only a few hundred people read each blog post? I’m not writing for them as much as I’m writing for myself — to get what’s in my head out where it can be read by others.

Isn’t that what Jackie was trying to do when she submitted her article to wickenburg-az.com?

This afternoon, while slowly steaming in my camper with the air conditioner on full-blast, I took a moment to connect to the Internet, check my e-mail, and check up on my Twitter friends. One of them, Highway 89 Project photographer Ann Torrence, had linked to a blog post she’d just updated, “Collection of Airport Codes.” In it, she wrote about her dislike of flying and provided a table of codes for the airports she’s been to.

It’s interesting to me because the average person doesn’t pay much attention to the three- or four-character airport codes that are part of a pilot’s life. For each airport listed — and she listed airports all around the world — she included a very brief comment about her experience there.

While I’m not nearly as well-travelled as Ann, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been to more airports. In many cases, however, I was the pilot in command when I landed at the airport. I have my own story for each of the airports I’ve landed at. So I decided that it might make a good theme for future blog posts about flying.

This, in turn, triggered an idea for a meme — something that other pilots who blog could write about, too. What are the airports that you’ve landed at? Pick one and write about it. You can write about why you went there, what you were flying, or what it was like. You can write about the perfect weather or nasty crosswind or unreasonably hot temperatures. You can write about the coffee in the FBO, the courtesy car, or the line guy — or lack thereof. You can write about the people you were with and what they thought when you made that perfect landing — or two, or three. (Just teasing my airplane friends.)

If you pick up this meme and spread it, please do use the Comment link or form below to post a comment with the URL for the blog post you created. Be sure to say a little bit about the post when commenting to prevent my spam protection software from thinking it’s just spam and deleting it. (It tends to delete comments that contain only links, especially if there’s more than one link.) As long as the link points to a post in this meme as described here, it’ll stay. You can copy any part of this post to spread a description of the meme, as long as you link back to this post so others who follow it will add their links to the comments here.

In the meantime, I’ll start writing my own posts about some of the airports I’ve landed at. I’ll try to keep it interesting.

I hope those of you who have blogs will join the fun. Because, as we all know, an airport is far more than the three- or four-character code that represents it on charts, publications, and GPSes. I want to read your stories.

Reader comments are often what can make a blog far more interesting than it would be without comments. In fact, the commenting feature of blog software can create a community at a blog when regular readers and commenters add their two cents to blog posts.

Unfortunately, not everyone has something of value to add to a conversation. And that doesn’t stop them from adding it.

Comments Here

I review every single comment posted to this blog, so I know the full range of comment quality. Tossing aside the hundreds of daily automated spam comments caught by my spam protection software and the obvious attempts of human readers to redirect my blog’s readers to their sites, the “real” comments can be informative, helpful, interesting, funny, or thoughtful. But they can also be sarcastic, nasty, rude, or offensive.

I state my comment policy in various places throughout this site, including here. Although I occasionally do have to delete a comment that’s overly offensive or one that’s sure to generate a nasty argument, in general, this site has a great group of regular readers and commenters that don’t need to be watched over as if they’re poorly behaved children.

As an example of how much commenting can contribute to a blog, check out one of my posts, “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has accumulated almost 50 comments in just over a year. Many of these comments offer helpful insight to helicopter pilots and wannabes. They’ve created a conversation that just keeps growing — indeed, five comments have been added to that post in just the past week.

Anyway, I welcome comments and won’t prevent one from appearing unless it’s either offensive or totally self-promotional. Get a conversation going. I really enjoy it. And reader comments are often what trigger me to write new blog posts.

A Comment Policy From Down Under

Today, while in search of both images from the Iran missile photo controversy, I stumbled upon an article on the Herald Sun Web site. It showed both photos and provided some commentary about the situation. It mentioned that Iran was firing more test missiles today. The thought that if they kept firing missiles for tests they might run out came to my mind. Since the article had a comment field, I decided to voice that unlikely but amusing thought, mostly to lighten things up.

I posted the comment and submitted it. On the confirmation page, the following comment policy appeared:

Please note that we are not able to publish all the comments that we receive, and that we may edit some comments to ensure their suitability for publishing.

Feedback will be rejected if it does not add to a debate, or is a purely personal attack, or is offensive, repetitious, illegal or meaningless, or contains clear errors of fact.

Although we try to run feedback just as it is received, we reserve the right to edit or delete any and all material.

What I like about this comment policy is how clear it is. It’s warning commenters, almost up front, that what they submit may not appear at all or as it was submitted. I like the second sentence/paragraph. (Oddly enough, the commenter before me said “I Still dont Belive USA went to the Moon” and I’m wondering how that got through the moderation process, being that it’s pretty much meaningless, contains clear errors of fact, and does not add to the debate, but I guess that’s just my opinion.) I find the third sentence/paragraph bothersome, mostly because I don’t believe in editing someone’s comment. If it needs editing, it probably shouldn’t appear at all.

Up for Commenting

Anyway, I’m just tossing this out there, mostly to see what visitors here think about it.

Commenting is one of the good and bad things about blogging. On this site, I really enjoy most of the non-spam comments we receive. As long as you keep commenting, I’ll keep writing.

A little over a month ago, a Twitter friend (@desertlibrarian) tweeted about an hysterically funny blog post she’d read on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. This led me to subscribing to the RSS feed for Whatever. Scalzi’s apparently a hardcore SciFi author and although I enjoy some SciFi now and then, I’ve never read any of his books. (He’s probably never read any of my books, either.) His blog posts about SciFi don’t interest me very much (sorry!), but his thoughtful and well-written commentaries about other things — such as the Creation Museum — make it well worth keeping the feed subscription.

It seems that Mr. Scalzi had been keeping another blog or site that featured a “Weekend Assignment.” Here’s his summary of that feature from a recent post on Whatever:

For those of you who used to read By The Way, you’ll know that every Thursday I wrote up a “Weekend Assignment,” to give folks something to do with their blogs over the weekend (Friday - Sunday, for AOL Journals, was typically the time period in which the members posted the least). I’m not doing the Weekend Assignments anymore, but I’ve bequeathed the activity to Karen Funk Blocher (aka Mavarin), and she’s doing them on her blog now. The first of her Weekend Assignments is up, and it’s asking what people are doing with their time in the wake of the WGA strike.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote an almost pointless blog post about how much trouble I sometimes had finding something to write about. And then I find this.

So, if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got something to write.

I’m a writer and have been since my early teens. So it’s easy for me to write. It’s easy to take an idea and communicate it to others using words, sentences, and paragraphs.

The problem I have is coming up with ideas to write about.

What to Write About?

Sure, I can write about what happened to me yesterday. But is it interesting? Barely. (For the record, I woke up late after being up for 2 hours in the middle of the night, spent some time messing around with some GTD (”Getting Things Done”) software that’s supposed to help me be more productive, ordered pizza for my local helicopter mechanic and a few other pilots, hosted a pizza party at my friend’s hangar (which is insulated and has amenities such as a latte machine and leather sofa), and came back home to waste some more time with the same GTD software (which wasn’t working as advertised) thus not getting much else done.)

I can also write about the things I think about, which can be more interesting when I’ve had time to fully develop my thoughts. Lately, I’ve been thinking about politics, but I don’t feel well informed enough to blog about my thoughts. I’ve also been thinking about the English as the official language issue, but I haven’t finished thinking about it — or reached a stage where I’m ready to write. I’ve been thinking about the pitfalls of living in a town that’s trying to be something it’s not — which is also something that it wasn’t when I moved here — but why waste my time preaching about something that no one cares about?

Why I Blog

I like to start each morning with a blog post. I sit at the kitchen table with my coffee and my laptop and write about whatever comes to mind.

I find this therapeutic. I’m taking my organized thoughts and recording them where I — and others — can read them again and again. Or perhaps I’m taking unorganized thoughts and organizing them as I get them out.

It doesn’t matter to me whether people read what I write. I blog primarily for myself. (Remember, blog is short for Web log and my blog is a personal journal.)

While it’s always nice to have readers who comment to say that they like what I’ve written or add some information I hadn’t known or considered, getting readers or reader participation is not my primary goal. It’s the head-clearing aspect of blogging. Getting it out of my head and onto…well, not exactly paper, but something that’s just as “permanent” and accessible.

Unpublished Blog Posts

Sometimes I’ll start a blog post and never finish it. It’ll remain as a draft on my computer’s hard disk, waiting for future attention it may never get. This isn’t as good as publishing a blog post. That’s not because publishing is the goal. It’s because completion of the thought is the goal and an uncompleted blog post represents an unfinished thought.

I can also assume, when I don’t finish a blog post, is that I didn’t have enough to write about when I began it.

Full Circle

Which brings me full circle with this blog post.

The topic was the lack of topics. And I proved a lack of topics by writing a blog post that didn’t really cover anything in enough detail to make it worth reading.

Have I just wasted my time? It appears so.

Have I wasted yours? Please accept my apologies.

I was surfing aimlessly this morning, just finishing up my trip around the net, when I came across a widget like the one you see here on another blogger’s blog. His blog was worth $74K. I clicked the link, filled in the form and soon learned that my blog was worth $64,922.10.

(I should note that $64,922.10 is the number that came up today, when I wrote this post. It’ll be interesting to see how that number changes, especially as I continue to move book support related content off this domain name and only MariasGuides.com.)

While it would be nice to think that what I’ve been spouting here has a lot of value, I sincerely doubt that it has this much value. I’m certainly not one of the “A-list” bloggers out there. My content covers too many topics to have a consistent readership. I don’t get a lot of comments. And my subscriber numbers seem to hover between 100 and 200, no matter what I do. So $64Kk seems pretty outrageous to me.

But I’m sharing this with readers as a curiosity. Have any of you checked the value of your blog using this widget? If not, give it a try and see what comes up. Report your findings in the Comments for this post. Be honest! And tell us whether you think your number is as outrageous as mine.

And if you do visit the site where this widget can be found, tell me what you think: Is the blog a splog? I think it is.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to buy this blog, the current going price is…well, whatever is says in the box above.

A few months ago, I read a blog post by some A-list pro blogger that briefly discussed eZineArticles.com as a place to publish articles and generate hits for your site. The idea was that the articles contained a byline with links and people who read them would come back to your site to read more. The result: more hits.

I dug deeply into my well of content and found a handful of articles I didn’t mind republishing. I formatted them as required and submitted them to eZineArticles.com, after setting up an account as an author. A bunch of the articles were bounced back because they read like blog posts. But I successfully argued that they did provide useful information in my somewhat conversational and bloggish writing style. All five articles were published on the eZine Articles site.

First Surprise: Anyone Can Republish!

What I didn’t realize at first was that anyone who sets up a publisher relationship with eZineArticles.com could republish my work, as long as it was republished exactly as written and included my byline, bio, and links. I discovered this when an article I wrote about flying at sunrise was picked up by a Web site with content about cruising.

After a few e-mails went back and forth between me and the site owner and eZineArticles support staff, I realized what I’d missed by not reading the fine print — I was basically granting a very broad set of rights to eZineArticles.com. But the site that had used the piece was a high quality site and I didn’t mind my recycled work appearing there. And the eZineArticles folks assured me that publishers had to meet certain requirements to use the work.

Second Surprise: Hot Sex?

But I wasn’t very happy when I traced a link to one of my Antelope Canyon photos article to a Blogger blog with the words “hot-sex” in its domain name. Although the site didn’t appear to contain any porn, I didn’t want my content — or name! — associated with it. So I wrote to eZineArticles support to complain.

Today, I found the same article used on a site with “nurse-fetish” in the domain name. Now I was pissed. I wrote again to the eZineArticles staff.

eZineArticles.com Responds

My new message crossed their response to the first one in the ether. In their response, they told me that if I didn’t want my work on a specific site, it was my responsibility to contact the owner of that site and ask him to remove it.

Ever try to contact the owner of a Blogger blog? It’s not possible if they don’t want to make it possible.

I replied that their response was completely unsatisfactory and that I would be deleting all of my articles from their site.

And then I did.

Lessons Learned

I am certainly not desperate enough to be published or to get hits by releasing my work on a site that allows distribution without prior approval by the author. Frankly, I don’t think any author should be that desperate.

eZineArticles.com obviously doesn’t give a damn about its authors if it won’t work to prevent this kind of activity with an author’s work. Any author who publishes with them deserves whatever shit he gets — including his name spread around on sites of questionable quality and purpose.

From now on, I will publish my work electronically in only three places:

• Here, on this site, where my work is covered by a copyright notice that helps protect my work from misuse.
• On the sites of publishers who pay me for my efforts and protect our copyrights.
• On the sites of other bloggers who have asked me to guest author for them and will protect our copyrights.

I’m angry about this, but I know it’s my own fault. I was conned, first by the pro blogger who pushed eZineArticles.com and then by eZineArticles.com itself. I don’t understand why anyone would allow their work to be reproduced in a way that they cannot control. Could they all be as stupid as I was when I signed up?

As for the “hot-sex” and “nurse-fetish” sites, I wonder how the other female eZineArticles authors feel about their work — and their names — appearing there.

I am not color blind. I know I’m not. I see colors and I know when certain colors look good together. But I can’t, for the life of me, come up with a color scheme on my own.

Color, of course, is a major part of any Web site’s look and feel. So when I found a blog post months ago that listed a few online color tools, I bookmarked them for later use. On Saturday, one of them came in very handy as I decided on a color scheme for my blog’s new look.

The Color Wizard is a Flash application by Donald Johansson. This excellent online tool helps you find colors that work well together.

From the Color Wizard page:

The color wizard lets you submit your own base color, and it automatically returns matching colors for the one you selected.

It returns a set of hue, saturation and tint/shade variations of your color, as well as suggests color schemets to you, based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations. The color wizard also has a randomize function that lets you generate color schemes you might not have thought of on your own.

It’s the randomizer that helped me. I just kept clicking the Randomize button until I found a few schemes I liked. When I had about eight of them, I went back and reviewed each one, eliminating the ones I liked less until I had one I liked a lot. I then picked the blue color from the theme and generated another scheme from that, so I could get the colors I planned to use for my links.

What was also handy for me was the print feature. Although it’s not obvious on the application, if you right-click the Flash app, a Print option appears in the shortcut menu. I used that to print my two color schemes on my color printer. So not only can I visualize what the colors look like — or at least approximately what they look like; I don’t have a great color printer — but I have a document that clearly lists all the hex codes for all the colors.

I’m so pleased with the results that I clicked the Donate link at the bottom of the Color Wizard and used my PayPal account to send the developer some lunch money. (As usual, I urge everyone who uses great free software like this to thank the developer with a donation or at least a visit to his advertiser’s sites.)

Looking for a color scheme? The Color Wizard is a great place to start.

When I started subscribing to feeds about a year or so ago, I only subscribed to a handful and quickly read through the new posts each day. In fact, I recall asking other readers for suggestions on feeds I should subscribe to.

Things change. I began accumulating feeds. I use endo, an offline feed aggregator, and I’m very pleased with it. It sucks down my feeds each morning when the computer starts up and presents them to me as I’ve organized them, so I can read them at my leisure.

Unfortunately, I started subscribing to a number of feeds that put out 5 to 10 new posts a day. And there were more than a few days that I didn’t read any new posts. And then days when I felt rushed and put aside certain feeds for another day. And another day.

The problem got serious. At one point, I had over 2,000 unread posts in endo. Not acceptable. I killed off a bunch of feeds that were just too heavy with a low percentage of content that actually interested me.

But today I decided to take drastic steps. I went into endo and deleted any unread post that hit the Web before August 1. That brought 1300 unread posts down to 124. A much more reasonable number.

Did I miss great content? Possibly. But one of the things I’ve noticed — especially in blogs about blogging — is that the same basic topics come up over and over again. If you missed the “5 Ways to Energize Feeds” this week, you’ll catch the “7 Ways to Make Your Feed Pop!” next month. You get the idea. Same old, same old. You can read this stuff for two months before it starts to recycle with very little content that’s really new.

Hmmm…I feel a new topic coming on. I’ll have to put this on my list of things to write about here.

After I’ve gone through those 124 posts waiting for me in endo.

I’ve recently been involved in a discussion with another blogger — we’ll call him Tom — about blog post length. Tom has instituted an “aside” feature in WordPress that applies different formatting to very short posts that he’s identified as “asides.” But the length of his “short” posts is still longer than the length of other bloggers’ average posts.

And while the different formatting of asides comes through on Tom’s site, there’s no differentiation on his blog’s RSS feed, which is how I normally read his blog. So to me, Tom’s blog just suddenly started getting posts that were short, along with the other ones that were relatively lengthy.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that my blog posts range from a single bullet items for a “This Just In…” link (which, by the way, is created automatically by del.icio.us) to 2,000+ word ramblings. That’s why I didn’t think it mattered how long a post was. It doesn’t really matter to me.

But Tom had made a distinction between his shorter posts — perhaps 150-200 words in length — and his longer ones — which probably approached 1,000 words. And that got me thinking (which is always a dangerous thing): what’s the “right” length for a blog post?

The Argument for Long Blog Posts

A long blog post, one can argue, shows that a lot of thought and effort has gone into the topic. The blogger started with an idea, perhaps jotted down some notes about points he wanted to cover, did some research that resulted in useful links, and wrote up the post.

This is [supposedly] what we browse the Web for. Anyone can grab a few links and call it a blog post. But how many people can actually write something original based on an idea and references on other sites and blogs? Surely fresh content backed up with links to references has good value. And that’s what serious bloggers should be striving to create.

The Argument for Short Posts

Short posts can have a certain wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am quality to them. You get a thought, you share it, and you move on to the next thing, leaving the reader to think the rest out for himself. If what you’re sharing is compelling enough, the reader might follow whatever links are included to learn more or do some other research or thinking on their own.

While that might be good for readers who like to think for themselves, I’m not convinced that all of them do. They want the blogger to do the brainwork and report the results. After all, if they wanted to do their own serious thinking and research about a topic, they’d likely become bloggers themselves.

Again, this all depends on the blogger. Some bloggers can, in a short post, put a new spin on a topic that’s been explored by others. Those blog posts are a real pleasure to read.

Other bloggers seem to simply rehash the thoughts of others. You know. Soandso says this and whosewhatsit said that. Here are the links.

Oddly enough, a blogger’s success does not appear to be tied into how well he can come up with original content. Many popular bloggers fill their blogs primarily with links or brief commentaries about other bloggers’ conclusions, without adding much food for thought. Yet they continue to gain a following, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.

My Argument

My argument is that it doesn’t really matter how long a post is, as long as it provides something of real value to the reader. Does it make him think? Does it give him fresh information? A new way to look a topic?

If the answer is yes to any or all of those things, what difference does it make how long the post is?

My Problem (or one of them, anyway)

But Tom got me thinking hard about post length. And although he’s worried that his asides are too short to be considered posts, I’m worried that my posts might be too long.

My problem is that my blog posts are often a bit too original, based on my own personal experiences. Although they tend to be peppered with appropriate links — when I find them — if you’re looking for a blog post based on someone else’s post or one that’s heavily cross-referenced to others, you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. I’m on another planet sometimes — planet Maria, perhaps — and I draw from the well of useless (or sometimes useful) information that’s in the atmosphere there.

To further complicate matters, my blog posts tend to be very long at times, almost to the point of becoming pointless ramblings. (Yes, I do know this. Sorry. I can’t help it.) If I get an audience for the title, how many members last through the whole post? Even I don’t have the patience to read blog posts as long as some of the ones I write. So clearly, there’s a limit on length.

My Solution (to this problem, anyway)

My solution to the problem is to break up long posts into shorter, multi-part series posts. I’ve already done this with my post about Copyright for Writers and Bloggers. And the other day, I actually went back and broke up my post about Copy Editing, which was insanely long and rambling.

There are two benefits to this:

• My long posts get broken up into more easily digestible pieces. Now I don’t have to worry about keeping my audience’s attention for 2,000+ words.
• I can schedule parts to appear in the future. This is a great WordPress feature. Although I usually write multi-part posts in one sitting, they don’t have to appear all at once. That means I might even get a day off from blogging.
• On the off-chance that I’ve interested a new visitor in the topic of a multi-part post, he may just come back to read the remaining parts. Or, better yet, subscribe to my feed to have them delivered to his reader.

Did I say two benefits? I obviously meant three.

That’s Enough!

And on that note, I think I’ll draw this post to a close. After all, if I keep typing, I’ll just have to chop it into multiple parts.

In the first article of this series (Part I: Why Copyright is Important), I discussed the importance of copyrights to authors. In the second article (Part II: Creative Commons), I tell you about the Creative Commons license I use to protect the work on this site.

In this last article of the series, I explain the concept of fair use — or attempt to, anyway — and how it enables you to quote copyrighted works for certain purposes.

Fair Use

Now here’s a good question. What if you want to use one of my articles on your AdSense-supported Web site? Obviously, that’s in violation of my Creative Commons license. But what if you’re satisfied using only a part of it?

That’s where Fair Use comes into play. Fair use allows you to take a portion of copyright-protected material and use it provided the use meets the definition of “fair” as set forth by the Copyright Act of 1976:

…the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

You can read more about this on Wikipedia.

Fair Use is Common Sense

Fair use, of course, is ruled upon by judges when copyright infringement cases get to court. But you can keep yourself out of court — and be a good member of the blogging community — by using common sense and thinking through the use you have in mind.

For example, suppose you want to use portions of this article as part of a college course you’re teaching about copyright in the Internet age. You could print the article and share it as a handout with your students. Of course, you should also credit me as the author. That’s common courtesy in the writing world.

Or suppose you want to blog about this article as part of your own opinion piece about copyright. You could take a quote from my article and use it to make one of your points — or to present one of my points that you want to argue. (Be gentle, please.) For fair use, you’d have to limit the amount of material you used so it’s only a portion of the entire piece. You should also include my byline and a link back to my article — that’s common courtesy in the blogging world.

Both of these uses would be considered fair. What’s not fair is using a work in a way that would reduce demand or marketability for it — like reproducing it in whole on your Web site without a link back to the original. Or using it to make money by providing content on a site that exists primarily to generate advertising revenue.

Public Domain

There’s one more thing I want to mention here.

If you don’t care about how people use your work, you can release it into the public domain. This essentially means that you’re giving up all rights to it and people can do with it what they want.

If you find a work that’s in the public domain — including classic novels that are out-of-copyright — you can use them pretty much anyway you like. But let your conscience be your guide. Do you really want to claim that that passage from Mark Twain’s Roughing It was really penned by you?

Just remember, there’s nothing in this blog — or in most others — that’s in the public domain. Respect the author’s copyrights, whether they’re a standard copyright “All Rights Reserved” notice, a Creative Common’s license, or something less formal. It’s not just courtesy. It’s the law.

What Do You Think?

Got something to say about this? Use the Comments link or form below to get it off your chest.

In the first article of this three-part series (Part I: Why Copyright is Important), I discussed the importance of copyrights to an author like me. But is an “all rights reserved” copyright appropriate for work published on the Web? I don’t think so.

In this article, I tell you a little about Creative Commons and how I use it to license my work.

Creative Commons

What I write on my Web site is available here for free to anyone who wants to come read it. (Don’t get me wrong — if I can sell an article for real money, I do — and then link back to it from this site so my readers can still find it for free online.) But just because this material is available for free to read and link to doesn’t mean it’s not copyrighted. It is.

Many blogger and Web content creators use a Creative Commons licenses to set down the rules for using or reusing their work. The Creative Commons Web site makes this easy with its License page. As the page states:

With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.

You fill out a form like the one shown here by selecting options. You can click a link to display optional fields to provide more information for the licensee about the work you are licensing.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

When you click Create License, the site generates some HTML code that you can copy and paste into your blog or site. The box to the right shows the example for my site. As you can see, the code includes a Creative Commons logo and the name of the license you chose as a link to a page with the full text of the license. (Follow the link in the box to see the license I use on my site.) If you go to the © page of this site, you’ll see the same logo and link.

What It All Means

Here’s what my Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License means.

You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the material on my Web site under the following conditions only:

• Attribution. This means you must attribute the work to me. In other words, you must make it clear that I wrote or prepared the material you’re sharing. Not you. Not someone else. Not an unknown being. (So imagine my surprise recently when I found the full texts of one of my articles on someone else’s Web site under his byline!)
• Noncommercial. This means you cannot use my work for commercial purposes. In case you’re wondering, if your Web site or blog or publication is sold, subscribed to for a fee, or even earns revenue from Google AdSense or some other advertising program, you cannot use my work. In other words, you can’t make money by sharing my content. Period. End of statement. (And people who haven’t understood this have had their Google AdSense accounts shut down when I complained about their violation of my copyright, which is also a violation of Google’s Terms of Service.)
• No Derivative Works. This means you can’t take part of my work and use it as the basis for another work. You like my discussion of Creative Commons. Well, thank you. But don’t think of using it as Part 1 of a series of posts you want to do about copyright without firs talking to me. This license does not allow it.

The license goes on to state:

• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
• Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
• Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.

What does this mean to you? It means that you can only reproduce or share my work if you give me credit, don’t make any money on it in any way, don’t use it as the basis of another work, and include my Creative Commons licensing terms. If you want to make other arrangements, you need to make them directly with me.

That’s My License. Yours Could Be Different.

I’m very restrictive in my license. You might not want to be.

For example, you may not mind commercial use of your work as long as you are cited as author. Or perhaps you don’t mind allowing others to build on your work — as many open source software developers allow. This can all be stated in your Creative Commons license. Just choose the options that matter to you and let the Web site generate the Creative Commons license you want to use.

Remember you can always learn more about Creative Commons licensing on their Web site. The Creative Commons Licenses page provides detailed descriptions of all licenses.

But Wait! There’s More!

While my creative commons license may seem very restrictive, there are ways you may be able to use a writer’s work — even my work — without violating any law or license. The third and last part of this series explains the basics of fair use and public domain.

Do you use a Creative Commons license on your Web site? If so, which one? And why did you make that choice? Use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

This is the text you can find on the History page of the Creative Commons Web site. It explains, in part, why Creative Commons was formed and what it is trying to do.

In this three-article series, I’ll explain what copyright means to me and how I use Creative Commons on my Web site and blog to protect my work.

Copyright Is Important

As a professional freelance writer, I live in the first world: one where every last use of a work is regulated. Sure, I write computer books for a living. But did you know that some of my book contracts lay out the movie rights for my work? Movie rights for a computer how-to book? Are they kidding?

Sadly, they’re not. They really do take into consideration every last possible use of a work — even if that use is not very likely.

Copyright is important not only to me but to my publishers. Each book contract I sign lays down the rules of who owns the work and who has the right to market, promote, and sell it. We work together to come up with a contract that both parties are happy with, then work together to produce and sell the work so we can both make money. In general, this works pretty well. I write, my books appear in stores, and I get paid. My publisher produces my work, puts it in stores, and gets paid. We’re happy.

How Copyright Infringement Hurts Everyone

When things go wrong is when people take our work — because it really is both mine and my publisher’s together — and illegally reproduce it, either by hard-copy or digital means, and share it with others. This reduces the potential paying market for our product. How many copies of a book do you think we could sell if someone else was giving them away for free to anyone who wanted them?

And when copyright infringement like that exists and becomes widespread, books don’t sell well enough to be worthwhile to produce. Publishers don’t make enough money on certain titles, so they publisher fewer books or, worse yet, go out of business and stop publishing books altogether. Writers find it harder and harder to get book contracts, so they don’t write as much — or they stop writing.

The result: there are fewer resources out there for people who want to learn new things with the assistance of a knowledgeable author and a book they can read and refer to over and over.

All because enough people thought that our work should be distributed for free.

This hit home recently when I discovered a Web site that was distributing, free of charge, two of my books in electronic format. But it wasn’t just my books they were distributing. It was over 300 different computer how-to books — some of which were only a few months old — and tutorial DVDs and even software. The site’s slogan was “Because knowledge should be free.”

What they don’t understand is that their actions are taking away the livelihood of professional writers who work hard to write those books. Authors are people who rely on the income from books sold to survive and thrive and care for their families. Every book illegally distributed rather than sold is money from a writer’s pocket.

You’ve heard the phrase “starving writers,” haven’t you? (I never did like the idea, myself.) Think about that the next time you illegally download a pirated eBook or photocopy pages of a library book to share with your friends.

What’s Next

In the next part of this series, I’ll explain how Creative Commons helps writers and bloggers license their Internet work for use by others.

In the meantime, let’s get a discussion going. Got some thoughts about copyright protection and piracy? Use the Comments link or form below to share them.

In yesterday’s post, “Getting Seriously Dugg,” I reported the history of a blog post that rose quickly to stardom in the world of Digg users. But that report was done early in the day, before the shit hit the fan (so to speak).

The Heat is On

The Digg count continued to rise throughout the day. And the hits kept coming. All morning long, there were at least 100 visitors online at my site at once. This is not normal here. And it was rather frightening. I kept expecting something to break.

But it wasn’t just the popular Digg post that was getting hits. It was the post about getting Dugg, too. Soon, it had more hits than the dugg post — even though it wasn’t dug by anyone at all. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Things came to a head at 11:15 AM when I got an e-mail message from my ISP:

Our Hosting Operations Admins have alerted us to an issue with your hosting account. The account has overutilized resources within the shared environment. As a result, the account has been moved to an isolated server for Terms of Service violators. You have 30 days to research and resolve this issue. After this time, the account will be evaluated again. If the issue is resolved, the account will be migrated back to the shared environment. If it persists, you will need to move to a full Dedicated server.

I got on the phone immediately and called my ISP. To my knowledge, I hadn’t violated any terms of service by getting hits. My plan allows 2,000 GB of bandwidth per month. The billing month starts on the third — that day. So far, in all the years I’ve hosted there, I’ve never exceeded 6% of my monthly allowance. Just because I was getting 30 times the usual number of hits I get in a day, it was still not much more than I’d get in a total month. So there was no way I’d even come close to 10% of the monthly allowance — let alone exceed it.

The guy who answered the phone was extremely polite but equally clueless. He had to talk to Advanced Hosting. He couldn’t let me talk to them. They gave him a song and dance about too many domain names pointing to the same site. He attempted to hand the same thing to me. I told him that that shouldn’t matter since none of those domain names were advertised anywhere. Besides, there were only about a dozen of them pointing to one site and maybe 15 pointing to another. I wasn’t aware of any limitation.

“I’ve been dugg,” I told him. When I got no answer, I asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he said.

I explained that it meant that one of my blog’s posts had become very popular and that people were flocking to my site to read it. I told him this was a temporary thing and that it should be back to normal by the end of the day. I hoped.

He told me that if I continued to get so many hits to my site, I’d have to get a dedicated server. I told him I’d evaluate after I’d seen my stats for the day. (My account is updated daily in the middle of the night.)

We hung up.

A Brief Intermission

I went flying. I took a couple from Virginia on an hour-long helicopter tour in the Wickenburg area. I showed them mine sites and canyons from the air. We saw a lot of cows, too. Afterward, I goofed off at the airport, chatting with two jet pilots who’d come in and were waiting for passengers. Then I went shopping for dinner. I got home and had a snack. Then I looked at Digg. It was 4 PM.

What Happened in Five Hours

The post that had started it all now had more than 1,200 diggs. It had been viewed almost 30,000 times. The post about that post, which hadn’t been dugg at all, had been viewed more than 40,000 times.

But thankfully, there were only 33 people online. So the flood had begun to subside.

On the Digg Technology page, my dugg post was listed near the bottom, under newly popular. (Ironically, on the same page, near the top, was a post about how Digg was losing popularity. That had more than 1,200 diggs, too.)

The Morning After

It’s the next day. I can now look back objectively on my blog’s day with a Digg Top 10 Tech post by studying some of the stats for the day and how the differ from other days.

My ISP reports that for the first day of my billing period — yesterday — I used up .55% (that’s just over half a percent, folks) of my monthly bandwidth. That means that if every day was like yesterday, I’d still come in at less than 20% allowable bandwidth. So I don’t know what “terms of service violation” they were whining about.

W3Counter, which I use to track page hits and visits, says I got just over 27,000 page hits yesterday. Look at the chart below; it makes my site look flat-line dead before yesterday. Honestly — it wasn’t that dead.

Today’s hits are about 3 times a normal day. Nice, but I’m willing to bet it drops down to normal within the next few days.

W3Counter also sent me an e-mail message warning me that their free service doesn’t cover sites that get more than 5,000 hits a day.They say I need to upgrade to a pro account for $4.95/month. We’ll see how long before they disable my current account — I’m not paying them to tell me how many hits I get when I can easily set up some stat software with a free WordPress plugin. (ShortStats, which we wrote about in our WordPress book, comes to mind.)

(I have not been able to reconcile page hits as reported by W3Counter with article reads as reported by a WordPress plugin. I have a sneaking suspicion that the WordPress plugin counts bots.)

Digg, as a source of hits, kicked Google out of the top spot on my site. Google used to account for 54% of my visitors. Now, for the 14-day period tracked by W3Counter, Digg is the big source. Google doesn’t even make the list any more, with all the different Digg URLs people used to find my site. So my sources stat is completely skewed and pretty much useless for the next 13 days. And 93% of the hits in the past 14 days have been to the 18-year-old mouse story.

Meanwhile, WP-UserOnline reports that yesterday saw the most users online at once on this site: 375. I don’t think this site will ever see that many concurrent users again.

My RSS feed subscriptions have more than doubled. That’s great. (If you’re a new subscriber, thanks for tuning in. And don’t worry — I don’t write about Digg every day.) It’ll be interesting to see if that number continues to climb or if I manage to scare all the new folks off by failing to provide more Diggable content on a daily basis.

My Google AdSense revenue for yesterday was right in line with an average high day. When you consider that I got about 20 times my normal number of page hits yesterday, you might think that I’d get 20 times the revenue. I didn’t. Obviously, Digg users don’t click Google ads.

The last I checked, the 18-year-old mouse story got just over 1,357 Diggs. I think that I actually encouraged the extra Diggs by placing the Digg icon at the top of the post. I’ve since taken it away from all posts.

I’ve realized that I don’t want to be seriously Dugg. Other than the surge in new RSS subscribers, there really isn’t any benefit to it.

What do you think?

Have you been slammed by being dugg? How did it affect your hosting account or other services? Use the Comments link or form to let the rest of us know.