Protecting your Blog’s Content

Today while checking my blog stats through Google Analytics and Stat Press, a very useful plugin for wordpress analytics, I noticed a massive increase in my blog page views in relation to visitors. What struck me as strange was that a bot had visited nearly every blog post that I have written in the past year, each page load had lasted just under 20 seconds. It struck me as odd, and for the first time I started looking into copyright protection for all the information that I have generated on this blog over the past year. I have spent a lot of time and effort in writing the material that I have, and for some reason I had never really thought about copyright protection. When I started researching this topic I found a wealth of information online and a whole set of divergent points of view. This was fascinating in itself and as usual an entire afternoon was spent researching this topic.

Some of the things I learned was:

1. Bots: These dataminers or crawlers are prevalent throughout the blogosphere. No blog is really safe from them unless you put up some road blocks manually. I had noticed some irregular patterns on my blog from a couple of bots who were either spamming comments or just driving my page views through the roof. This was slowing down the loading time of my blog and also causing a lot of frustration on my part as far as spam comments are concerned. I installed WP-Ban plugin which allows you to block these bots from entering your website and things seem to have settled down a little bit since.

2. Creative Commons: When I was researching data or images protection online;  creative commons kept on surfacing. This is an amazing project and provides a great platform through which artists and writers can set up how they want to share their work. I would be delighted if someone would like to use some of my work on their website. The only stipulation I have is that I would like it to be attributed to me when it is used. I got myself the creative commons widget for wordpress from this website.

3. Copyright: Apart from this, I found a lot of bloggers have chosen alternative paths to copyright their assets. On one extreme you have Dosh Dosh who writes extremely well about the online world and blogging, he/she has a dedicated copyright page that can be found here. There are strict guidelines for the use of blog material and consequences of using the material without permission. On the other hand you have Leo Babauta’s blogs, his page is named ‘Uncopyright‘. He has released the copyright of his material. What I have currently done is just add a copyright line in my RSS feeds and on the front page of my blog.

To be honest I am quite confused right now on the path that needs to be taken to approach this copyright issue. Both the examples quoted above have different objectives behind their blogs. Being relatively new to the blogspace, I will have to find my own way and decide the best route to take. In the meantime I would really like to hear from bloggers in the ‘ small business and entrepreneurship niche’ as to what your take and opinions on copyright protection are and what steps you have taken to protect your content. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

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