The first thing that comes to my mind is that I am still blogging regularly after nine months. I find this to be a bit of an accomplishment, as I usually get bored and find a new hobby within 30 days.
The second thing that crosses my mind is that a select few of you continue to return to this page to see what kind of nonesense I have to write about. Some of you know me personally, and some of you don't know me at all. I watch my Site Meter; you don't block your cookies. There's a few of you in the Eastern Time Zone and a few in Russian Federation Zone 7 that keep coming back. Don't worry, it's cool. Readership in this blog grows every month. Sure, I'm not getting millions of hits, but my evil narcissitic side wants to expand his sphere of influence. [insert scheming sinister laugh here: "Muuahh ahh ahh ahh ahh!"]About a month ago, I submitted my site to BlogsCanada, which is one of those database sites that list thousands of blogs. The webmasters of BlogsCanada, however are a little picky when it comes to choosing what they deem to be acceptable content. I suspect that they want to have quality material on their site (whatever quality means), they might be weary of malicious content, be it terrorism-related, anti-semitic, or other simliar ilk, or perhaps they want to filter out kiddie porn. Today, I got a message from one of the webmasters stating that my site has been added to the BlogsCanada directory.
Of course the reason why I submitted it [this site] in the first place is an attempt to increase my readership. I have linked to very few bloggers, and I doubt that anyone else has linked to me, so I am in my own little corner of cyberspace.
On a different tangent, I am surprised that some people actually make money blogging. I have heard claims that some people make as much as $5000 per month by placing ads on their blog (I find that hard to believe). I have issues regarding ads and banners on my site, and as long as blogging doesn't cost me any money, then the ads will remain absent from this site. On the other hand, if this blog began to get a serious amount of traffic, and I had to buy server space and bandwidth, then I would have to consider ads. But I expect that will never happen.
Jim Elve is the main figure at BlogsCanada. He writes a column of the highest quality, and is currently addressing issues that involve bloggers directly. I'm referring to the "C" word. Copyright. This entry discusses how bloggers are being plagarized by a service/product called Skweezer. For a monthly fee, Skweezer "compresses" web content for display on your cellular phone, PDA's, or other small-screened portable device. It is essentially a filter that removes images and coverts everything to plain text. What is upsetting authors, is that their content is not only being changed in its' presentation, but if you profit from ads on your site, you will find that Skweezer removes your advertisments and replaces them with their own. Not only are they profiting from subscribers, but they are profiting from running their own ads. The author who makes a little money from running ads on his site is ultimately the loser.
If you are a webmaster and rely on ads for revenue, you might want to consider blocking Skweezer's IP address from accessing your sites. It is 216.115.239.17. It seems that Skweezer has run into some sort of legal action regarding the re-distribution of copyrighted material, but for now it seems that the only thing we can do is block Skweezer's IP.
For the little guy like me, this issue doesn't affect me much. If I ever profit from this little website, you'd be sure that I'd be blacklisting Skweezer.
