If you’re interested in making some money off of your photography, you might want to check out Photrade.com. Photrade.com is currently an invitation-only beta service that will allow you to make money off of your photographs. You can either have ads with the photos, or simply get a little bit each time one of your photos is used elsewhere on the web. I hope I get an invitation so I can experiment with the system.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

The web site BlogSecurity.net has been down for nearly 24 hours now. I tried emailing abuse@ and postmaster@ and both messages bounced back to me. That’s a shame, I was really enjoying the site, it was full of good ideas for locking down your blogs. Hopefully they weren’t hacked, or driven off the web by crackers.

Update Dec 1, 2007 8:34am EST: They are back up. They are reporting that they were having DNS problems.

Daniel from Daily Blog Tips has created a Blog Incubator Project. I think it is an interesting idea, although the current implementation is flawed. The goal is to encourage someone to start a high-quality, popular blog. You come up with a topic you’d like to blog about, pay a $10 entry fee, then next week people get to vote on the ideas. Most popular idea gets the accumulated entry fees. This money will help you offset the expense of starting up the blog.

How much does it really cost to start a blog? ~$10 for the domain name. Hosting at WordPress.com is $10/year. Unless your blog idea requires you to spend a lot on supplies and materials (e.g. I’d love to blog about the OLPC laptop, so I need $400 to buy one), this is simply an easy way to monetize a blog idea up front, instead of waiting for content to develop and advertisers to appear.

Suggestion: An entrant should pay the $10, plus actually start the blog somewhere (theircoolidea.wordpress.org would be free) and describe the idea and give some sample (or real!) posts. Then we voters could vote for the person and content that is best, not just an idea of what the blog may be about.

Last week I asked if Feedburner’s stats were inflated. After about a a week of testing, I think they are not, after the first day. Day two of using Feedburner showed the correct number of subscribers (3), and day three showed the additional people who subscribed. Many thanks to Tim King and Luis de la Rosa for signing up so I could see how well things were tracking.

(On an unrelated note, Tim is one of the bloggers I was reading last year at this time when I was considering leaving my full time gig to work at home full-time. As was Luis, a Mac programmer living in Northern Virginia.)

I looked through my server logs, and there are a lot of people reading my site through the RSS feed. Please switch your subscription in your reader over to http://feeds.planetmike.com/planetmikedotcom . Thanks.

In October Google began futzing with the PageRank of sites. Google apparently targeted sites which were selling advertising and/or links and not including the rel=”nofollow” tag on the link. PlanetMike.com was hit with a penalty of moving from a PageRank of 6 down to a 4. At first I wasn’t concerned, but then got to wondering if I was also missing out on referrals when people searched the web using Google. I also sat down and really thought about what I was trying to accomplish with the web site. Yes, earning a living is up there. But a lot of the ads were simply distracting, and I ended up deciding to remove all of the ads from my site. I asked Google for a “re-inclusion request” and about a week later, my PageRank went back to 6.

The question becomes, did the traffic I receive from Google change during the time my PageRank was reduced? It doesn’t appear so. Here is a chart for the three months of August 22, 2007 through November 21, 2007 (click it to enlarge).

Referrals from www.google.com are the blue line, and the maroon line is any Google site, images, international, and their main site. My PageRank was reduced from around October 25 until the first week of November. The traffic looks fairly regular, although it did increase in mid-October.

Is there a correlation between PageRank and referral?

Last night I ran the webalizer traffic report for this site. I was thinking that traffic had slowed down since I last ran the report in early February. I was basically right, with about 10% fewer pages per month viewed from February to October. But I’m still very pleased with the numbers. View the reports. I haven’t done any advertising of the site. And actually only basic maintenance. I’m getting ready for a major design overhaul, and one of the first steps in doing that is knowing the details of what I already have on the site, and what people are looking at.

I know I am about to commit heresy. Please forgive me, Oh Lord of the Web. But I doubt the Feedburner subscriber numbers are accurate. Everyone who is anyone has a nice little Feedburner icon on their site trumpeting that they have x,000 readers of their blog. How is that enormous number even possible? Feedburner wouldn’t be inflating the numbers, would they? Feedburner is thought to be a definitive source to find out how many subscribers you have, and so it is in their best interest to make web publishers feel good and show them with a little bit of extra subscribers.

So yesterday I signed up three of my sites with Feedburner. After looking at today’s stats report, I think the Feedburner counts are inflated.

I burned the feeds, then subscribed to each feed in: Vienna, Bloglines.com, and Google Reader. Today when I checked each site has six subscribers! It looks like some of those services are using different agent strings, which leads to an inflated count.

So, let’s test this out: Subscribe to my site’s Feedburner feed: http://feeds.planetmike.com/planetmikedotcom and then let me know that you’ve done so, either by leaving a comment here or by email. Make sure you say which reader you used to subscribe.

I wish there was a way to tell the search engines to only index the “content” area of a page. For example, on a blog, only the text from the title through the last comment should be indexed. Everything else, site navigation, ten most recent post titles, ten most popular text titles, footer text, should not be indexed. On my theater site, the right sidebar has a list of the shows that are coming up the next week. But when I search the site with Google, and happen to search for a show that is currently playing, every page on the site comes up. This isn’t useful.

One of the web sites I used to manage used a Perl-based search engine, Fluid Dynamics Search Engine. You could put comments in your site templates so that it wouldn’t index sections of a page. This worked very well. Their FAQ has an entry on this: How to prevent sections of your pages from being indexed. I want this functionality in the big search engines as well.

One of my other blogs has several sections in it that are not powered by WordPress, but my wife and I do a lot of work in those sections. But that work is behind the scenes, which means it isn’t immediately obvious that we’ve done anything to the site. So I created a twitter account just for that site, and installed their widget into the sidebar. We’ll see how well that works, but I think I am already pretty happy with the results. The site is ShowBizRadio.net, the audition and schedule listings are the largest sections that aren’t run by WP.

By the way, my twitter account is planetmike

I accidentally have discovered a company doing exactly what Bitacle did in mid-to-late 2006. It is scraping people’s RSS feeds from their blogs and mirroring the content in its entirety. Then they wrap lots of Google Adsense ads around it. So they are making money off of my work, and the work of others. The site is web.EnjoyChn.com. No link, they don’t deserve one.

From browsing their site, it looks like there are several hundred sites being pillaged this way. If I have time later this week, I may try to contact some of those people.

After the Bitacle debacle last year, I added the “Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter with Bitacle blocker” WordPress plugin to my site. It adds a copyright message to the footer of each post, which is dutifully reproduced on the violating web site. I tweaked the script to also include the IP address and the date/time stamp when my feed was retrieved. That information is also reproduced faithfully on the thief’s web site.

I went through all 41 of my pages, and found that until September 11, 2007 at 16:12:12, the thief was using IP address 58.31.119.82, which is assigned to a Chinese ISP. Since that date, all the requests have come from 69.93.255.82, which resolves to HostGator.com. The infringing web site resolves to 69.93.255.83, also at HostGator.

I have filed a complaint with (1) Google, to get the offender out of the Google index, (2) Google Adsense, to hopefully get them out of the Adsense program; and (3) HostGator, the web host involved in this. We’ll see what happens next.

Useful Resources:

• Google’s DMCA Information
• Google Adsense DMCA Information
• HostGator DMCA Information
• Web Design and the DMCA: Giving and Getting Take Down Notices
• Stop Bitacle
• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content