Important Things To Remember Before Conducting A Webinar

When it comes to material conducting a webinar is same as conducting a face to face seminar. The method of interaction is will different and it will be difficult to judge the personalities or understating of the audience as you are not face to face with the audience. There are few things that one needs in order to conduct the webinar like the hosts, content, features and price. When looking at a host one must make sure that going with a host who should be able to grow with your business. You must make sure that your webinar is open for to who may be in your target group. Features are also needed to be considered. The content is the most important things to look into.

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10 Inventions That Killed Other Services And Products

Looking back in time, we realize how much our lives have changed due to the fruits of technology. It has provided us with freedom and less consumption of time and resources. Pointing out a particular technology for the drastic changes in one’s life is simply not possible. A nation’s economic growth can be measured according to the level of technology. As the time passes by the advancement in technology becomes higher each day. It is because different types of problems arise and each of these problems has a unique solution. Different types of machines are being made to meet the needs of the people and several machines are being upgraded.
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5 Reasons the Android Tablet is Better than the iPad

Everyone is talking about Apple’s iPad. It is a great device, and it certainly has a huge share of the tablet market right now, but it’s not the only game in town. Before you plunk down several hundred dollars on an iPad, you should take a serious look at Android tablets. As great as the iPad is, there are some features that make the Android a better choice.

Flash Support

One of the biggest aggravations for Apple iPad users is that it doesn’t support Adobe Flash. Of course this isn’t a big deal, unless you’re trying to watch a Flash-embedded video on a website or you like to play Facebook games like Farmville or someone has a Flash introduction on their website. Well, actually, it really is a big deal. The fact that the Android supports Flash and the iPad doesn’t means that Android users don’t have to miss out on a huge part of the web. (more…)

Protect Your Blog Content

Don’t you just hate it when you spend hours on a blog post only to see the exact same content in another site?  It takes you a long time to come up with a particular topic or idea, a little bit more to put the bits and pieces together, and then some more to actually write out the post.  And, just like that, someone thinks he/she can take your content – live off your hard work!

It is thus no surprise that various sectors – and individuals as well – have made it their mission to help bring down splogs (including us).  This endeavor also means taking certain steps on your part to ensure that your blog content is protected to a certain degree.  After all, if sploggers were to have a harder time stealing content, they just might give it up.

What can you do to make it hard for sploggers to steal your content?

Plugins

There are many plugins that you can utilize to make it harder for sploggers to steal your content. They work in various ways, the end goal being the same: to protect your content. Some plug ins work by disabling functions that will allow the text to be manually copied. Others work by feeding bots fake content when they try to steal the content. Take a look around and see what you can use to protect your posts.

Data service centers/Web hosting services

You may not think about it, but your web hosting company might play a role in the security of your data. After all, the information that you post in your blog will be stored in the data center used by your web host. If they have security issues, sploggers may be the least of your worries. What can you do? Make sure that you choose the right web hosting company – one that will ensure the security of your data.

Splogs and plagiarism

For the longest time, the issue of plagiarism was seen as only occurring within the province of the academia. Copying and stealing another person’s work is only a problem in colleges and universities, and of course the occasional seedy journalist. The internet was pure and pristine. No one would dare steal someone’s work and then pass it off as their own. Of course, we all know that the internet is now the primary battleground for plagiarists and the hard-working people who actually write original content. More and more people are seeing plagiarism as a growing problem but, unfortunately, many also think that there’s nothing anyone can do to combat this crime.

But there are actually many things that a person can do to help combat plagiarism. There are many kinds of recourse they can take in order to curb this intellectual theft of original content that is being used for splogs and other dubious endeavors online. The first thing that should be done is to become vigilant. As holders of original content, a person must always be aware about the threat of plagiarism.

mouse overs and splogs

Your mouse is a great tool in immediately finding out if a blog or web site is actually a splog. You have to remember that most splogs are nothing more than link lists. A good way to immediately determine if a blog is actually a splog is by gliding your mouse over any link in the page. If you see a very long code and not the usual links that is quite familiar to anyone who surfs the net then you’ve found a splog. That long code is actually the affiliate clickthrough information.

Of course, sploggers are quite devious in that they also have other ways of going around this easy tell. Some sploggers actually have hidden link information. This means that when you hover over a link in a splog you won’t see the link appearing in the status bar. Of course, when you think about it, a legitimate web site won’t go through the trouble of hiding a link so, ironically enough, it becomes another clue that you are visiting a splog.

Splogs are made for money

Why do people operate splogs? The simple answer is money. Splogs can generate money for its operators without them having to put a lot of hard work on actual content.

Splogs earn money from advertising affiliate programs and other ad-based schemes to generate advertising links. They put in links that will fool you into thinking that these are recommendations to informative articles but are actually ad links — and these people earn from every click.

There are other splogs that earn money from hosting while others are more unscrupulous and earn from every click that an unsuspecting visitor will make on the splog pages.

That’s why you should be vigilant in looking at web sites. You wouldn’t want to be an unwitting contributor of money to these splog owners.

Splogs take advantage of feeds

If you see a blog that relies heavily on feeds then you’ve stumbled upon a another splog.

Sploggers (these guys are growing like weeds on the netosphere) will use the most inventive ways in employing feeds to get juicy content from other sites and then pass it off as their own content. they typically use variations of certain tactics to mask their splog and pass it off as benign site.

One tactic sploggers use is to grab feeds from different sites that have content that is similar or related to the splog’s “content”. They then use the excerpts in a manner that is similar to a blockquote — and this will even include links to the original source through the feed. There are those who are more brazen with getting content. These sploggers will lift the whole articles and content from the various related feeds and pass it off as their own. It’s really unfair especially for those whose content has been basically stolen.

Is Lijit turning into a splog?

If you’re a serious blogger you probably have heard about Lijit.

Lijit is a popular search app that’s used quite extensively by bloggers. Quite a number of bloggers use the service because it helps improve how the WordPress search operates. One additional benefit of Lijit is that it also lets people get content from sites that are included in the blogger’s network, and this includes social network sites and other blogs.

Unfortunately, the benefits of Lijit may be overshadowed by a recent new service that many think is eerily similar to splogs.

The whole idea behind the Lijit service is to pool together bloggers who tackle the same subjects and then amalgamate their content into a single site that is called a “publication”. In exchange for this service, content providers will have their sites linked in the hub site’s blogroll — with the articles getting linked back to the source.

What basically happens is that content networks act more like aggregators with the site even republishing the full content of the site’s rss feeds.

The theory is that, if member sites link to this hub, visitors will explore the network site, find new content to follow and this will increase readership for all of the blogs involved. It is very similar, in that regard, to other networks and traffic-generating schemes that have been tried over the years, usually without success.

However, the question remains, is this service a spam blog and should bloggers consider signing up?

The problem really lies with how spam blogs (or splogs) and scraper blogs are defined. The whole idea of slogs can be quite vague that it is hard to determine if you are being lured into propagating splogs or not.

The key will be in how these sites go about their business. For example, it is encouraging that Lijit still uses best practices in reusing content. When clicking on the headline of a story will bring you to the original story and the comments section also brings you to the original page. All of the permalinks in the site lead back to the original link, which is laudable.

On the other hand, the images used are merely hotlinked to the original source.

What lijit is doing may not be outrightly “spammy” but it borders on it. Having said that, if you think the search tool it offers is indispensable, then do use it. But be aware that the site’s behavior can also have negative consequences so try to temper its use by periodically looking at what Lijit does and if you start feeling uncomfortable with new policies then opt out of the service.

Nifty Tools Dificult Tools

The clamor to come up with an answer to the rising splog threat has many authors developing ways of securing and monitoring blogs that would be a good indicator of any attempts to hack or modify your posts. One such easy way to monitor your blog is with the DigoWatchWP which closely monitors your blogs on WordPress and sends you an email if any changes are found, even if the email says there is no change. (more…)