Blogger & Forum Ripoffs You Should Know About

If you write a blog or run a forum you need to know about the corporate snoop/spy bots that crawl your website or blog. These bots scrape your information then strip off your link and any info that is not relevant and sell the pertinent info to companies tracking their key words using social CRM platforms. According to the sellers of these platforms they allow companies to listen, engage, and act on their customers’ conversations across the entire social web.

This stripped and packaged info IS NOT available to the public unless they pay to get it. This unauthorized use of your website content also violates your copyright since they are using your work product without your permission. These bots also suck huge amounts of your bandwidth on your server as they crawl your site night after night looking for changes or new content.

Two of the bigger snoop bots are Radian 6 out of Canada www.radian6.com/crawler and Scout Lab. Using robot.txt to block the Radian 6 bot DOES NOT work, you have to email them to be taken off their crawl list. You can block the IPs Radian 6 bots use. Radian 6 uses the IPs 142.166.0.0/16  and 207.179.0.0/16.  You can block them using your IP block on your server admin panel or htaccess. If you're not sure how to block IPs contact your website host and they can do it for you in most cases. If you pen a blog you may not have control over this. I believe Word Press has a plug in for blocking IPs and stopping scraping.

More and more of these scraper sites are popping up around the world. Google is reportedly penalizing these public scraper sites in their search index ranking for having duplicate content but I wouldn't leave it to Google to watch my back. The sites like Radian 6 that charge for your content should also not be allowed to make money off your hard work.

Navigating The Legal Morass On The Wild Wild Interwebz

Many of us that own websites or pound out blogs are small companies or sole proprietors who don't have legal representation on staff. I just found this website BlawgIT that does a really good job of explaining the do's and don'ts for conducting business on the Internet for the small potato folks.

Brett Trout is the BlawgIT lawyer who covers subjects like , patents, trademarks, ID theft, social media accountjacking, copyright and more. Brett gets the Internet, writing in a switched on style about topics that website owners and bloggers need to learn about. He's "switch on" as we used to say in the military.

Brett has also written 2 books that are highly regarded for Internet users and business owners. Cyber Law: A Legal Arsenal for Online Business and Internet Laws Affecting Your Company. I just ordered mine for handy reference in the office.

Too Switched On?

The other night I was heading north to a duck hunt at Kern NWR. It was dark, having just left a fine supper of Carnitas at the Los Pinos restaurant at the top of the Vine (Grapevine) as some know it on I-5, north of Los Angeles. As each vehicle passed me I began to notice the blinking displays from laptops, GPS units, cellphones, Gameboys etc. I've always been a gadget freak and nerd but I began to wonder just how far we've become addicted to electronics. Many of the cars whizzing past had several people using electronic devices in them.


RING!!! RING!!! RING!!!! Hold on a sec, gotta answer this call.

I can remember a time when you loaded up the truck for a vacation to get away from the ringing phones and never ending questions from work. When you arrived at the rustic cabin or campsite there was no phone to answer, no mail, nothing. It was you and the beautiful woods with no annoying distractions.

On the other hand, a cellphone is good insurance to have if you become stranded or have an emergency of some sort. Most of these folks were traveling for the Christmas holiday. The I-5 can be a boring haul with the Tule Fog causing California's deadliest pileups.

Where is the line for too much electronic gadgetry?

I know some families who can't go anywhere unless little Johnny has his Gameboy, it keeps junior occupied and quiet many parents tell me. The world Johnny has never seen is screaming by and his head is buried in the toy. Part of traveling to me as a kid was seeing the sights, the wonder and awe of seeing new places and new things. Is the next generation missing out in their enlightenment or is this the new world order? Do I need to assimilate or can we bend the folks who are constantly wired and tuned in, off?

BEEP!!! BEEP!!! BEEP!!! Be right with you, gotta answer this page.

I see folks everyday walking around with I-Pods in their ears or yapping on a cellphone as they blindly negotiate busy intersections or walkways. Hearing is one sense I want turned on when big buses and machinery are buzzing by me just feet away. I wonder how many have been squished when they didn't hear the yell from someone to "Look out!!". Some states like CA here are passing laws prohibiting the use of cellphones while driving to try and prevent accidents from inattentive drivers. Some of the cellphone ring tones are flat out annoying, especially in a movie or restaurant. One goof had a screaming elephant in his cellphone the had everyone in the local cafe jumping up and looking for cover, me included. It was that loud.

That begs the question. Is all this electronic bombardment ruining our situational awareness as outdoorsmen? If we don't hear that Towhee singing how would we ever know what one sounds like? If all we hear is music and phone conversations as we walk around outside we will never enjoy the funny chatter of a red-headed woodpecker scolding a squirrel for daring to invade his tree.


RING!!!! RING!!! RING!!! Excuse me, gotta answer this call, BRB.

YouTube & Fair Use

Gee, what's the big deal, it was on the Internet so it's gotta be free to download right?

Anybody who's been around the Wild Wild Web very long has been to YouTube to watch a video or two. Many of the most watched videos are filmed by the Average Joe or Jane, who then dub in a music track from a well known band. Word spreads of their outstanding production and then one day they get the dreaded "Cease and desist" letter. Shortly thereafter their video is unceremoniously taken down. Who's right? "Why can't we use music in our videos?" is the cry heard round the Internet jungle.

To wit,


The copyright laws are an morass of lawyer mumbo jumbo but most folks try and run with the "Fair use" exception that allows certain uses of copyrighted material. Recently a court case was filed that may shed some light on this using copyrighted music on video issue. Los Angeles Times Article. A woman in PA is suing Universal Music Group after they had YouTube pull her video off because she had used some of Prince's music on a short video of her kid dancing around. The woman is claiming "Fair Use" for a defense in her case. Gonna be interesting the precedent this case will set.

Where do you stand? Should an artist's work product be protected under the copyright laws even if it's for personal use? Or for commentary or parody? Should this new generation, born with a mouse in their hand, be held to the same standards as us older folks were or do they get new rules to live by in the switched on computer age?

Time will certainly tell.

The Wild Wild Web, YouTube & Dinosaurs

They say dinosaurs faded out when they failed to adapt to changes on the planet here. Today I see the same thing happening with the Internet and the current dinosaurs who say "I don't get the Internet". How could you not get the Internet? It's like a huge library at your grubby finger tips. You can research a lodge for a fishing trip, check out pics to see what a jaguarundi really looks like and so much more. What kid didn't stare in wonder the first time they walked into the school library, all that info and such a short a time to cram it into our small melons.

Fast forward to the video age on the web today, online video is so dominant I'm thinking about turning off my DirectTV satellite. I can get all my hunting shows now on MyoutdoorTV.com. I watch the local news channels OTA (Over The Air), you know, the old TV antenna on the roof setup except now it's a digital HDTV feed to the big screen. It's all free too once you buy the HDTV tuner box. Who needs Sat TV anymore, especially at $100+ plus a month if you get the better packages? The only real channels I'll miss is my hockey which I can now watch on the laptop too.

Oh and about those dinosaurs, I recently bumped into a couple who questioned the free videos I shot of their company youth event and posted on YouTube. A few members of this companies' board were moaning the fact my YouTube video was ranked #3 in a Google search for their event and they were talking of having me pull the video. I had a verbal go ahead to film but some of the board members were not in the loop and had some heartburn over the videos. You'd have to be a fool to turn down free Google 1st page ranking like that promoting your product, especially when the video was geared to the younger generation which this company wants to attract. The company had filmed a commercial and some other video for TV broadcast at this same event but how many teens do you see sitting in front of a TV now days? It's the computer, Ipod or cellphone mostly that I see the kids paying attention to.

The links that are created with these videos and the websites that these links are posted on are what makes the web go round. It's the glue that holds this magic all together. So much so Google ranks linkage and the traffic on those links very high in the indexing of a website. The more links you have to high traffic websites the more golden you are, literally. For the small mom & pop companies this is the edge they need to get noticed, their foot in the door of the outdoor market. With a $500 camcorder, some $100 editing software and a decent computer you can produce your own promotional videos or "how to" video blogs (Vblogs).

I guessing if you're reading this you get the Internet but how many of your family or friends don't get the wild wild web? What are their reasons?

Have you embedded lately?