A Great Opening Paragraph

"WHEN T. S. Eliot said that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters, he surely was not thinking of a journey to Paris on a commercial airline, at a cost of $1,400, following a two-hour wait on the tarmac, in which cocktails on overseas flights are no longer free."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/fashion/20bummer.html

It turns a well-known line by a famous poet on its head while immediately focusing our attention on a current and urgent topic -- the high cost of travel. It's tastefully disrespectful of authority, witty and pertinent. Wastes no time to get to the heart of the issue.

Magic of Giving It Away

"Last fall, one of the largest subscription websites decided to make all of its content free and abandon the subscription model. That website was NYTimes.com. After opening up their website, they saw a traffic jump almost immediately of over 2.2 million unique visitors to the site.

Following this news, Rupert Murdoch seriously considered leaving his more than one million subscribers behind and opening up WSJ.com for free as well. He didn’t, however he did open up much more of his content and has since seen a 256% increase in unique visitors this year."

~ Mequoda Daily

Black Hat Blogging

Don't you hate it when "black hat" artists grab your articles and reprint them by flattening all your live links and then, to add insult to injury, INSERT their own RANDOM affiliate word-links to the text?

I have no idea why they do it because the result is a terrible stupid piece of text with an impossible URL.

Here is an example how one of my articles was butchered in this fashion:

http://deaqzhjrymekk.blogspot.com/2008/07/3rd-big-myth-of-search-engine.html

The URL is impossible because it is randomly generated by a black hat BLOG GENERATOR software. Not only the URL but the "name" of the blogger is also randomly generated.

And the sad thing is there is practically no defense against this kind of pirating. If I flag this blog and pursue the matter it will be deleted but 10 or 30 more will crop up before they even do so. It's a no-win fight up the cyber creek.

So what do I do? I insert my own "thank you" comments with my live link thinking "if a spider follows the links on this page it just might follow mine too and get me some Google-love"... yet I also know that it is a highly unlikely outcome.

So why do these pirates keep generating these random blogs by reprinting people's articles (most of the time published on sites like Ezine Articles) ? Because they are greedy and inexperienced and they really think they can make some money out of these totally bogus blogs. All they do is pollute the Internet.

USEFUL TIP: To catch such pirated and butchered "editions" of your articles just create a Google Alert account with your name as the keyword. Every time one of your articles is published on the Internet you'll receive a Google -email. Very easy to keep track of. The results may just amaze you.