DISQUS

I currently make a four-figure salary. Please send me a few hundred dollars so I can at least say I made five figures this year.

I like Plagium, since it is free. But one of my tests returned many false hits:

http://www.psonnets.org/psonnets/myheart.html

When I pasted in the first few lines of this poem, which I chose at random for the test, I got back a lot of results where the only similarity was the first line with the result's page.

I did the test again with the entire poem. I understand now. I should have used the whole poem instead of just five lines. (I am used to Googling small strings of text.) I see what the small and big bubbles mean now. The bigger the bubble, the more likely it is your text.

Did you realize all three links link to a YouTube video of Sesame Street's Count?

"Would they turn him down knowing that doing so would mean their kids being homeless and starving?" Some would. I've seen it happen.

When a Twitter user blocks another Twitter user, as I did when I was followed by someone I thought would steal my poems, is that user, when logged in, completely forbidden from seeing my page or any part of my feed?

If the search engines provided this kind of service...after all, the engines will index your site, anyway...then copyright infringement would become nearly a moot point online, at least for text content. Without search engine coverage, text-based splogs may as well not exist.

Maybe if the CuBert developers has replaced Q*Bert with a 3D Pacman, replaced the color-changing squares with edible pellets, replaced the snake and other jumping enemies with jumping ghosts, replaced the bouncing balls with Donkey Kong barrels, and replaced the escalator circles with Galaga ships, there wouldn't have been such a problem.

And for the bronze medal in Olympic comment moderation, the Disqus throw!

Heresy!!!

I filed an online complaint against a local McDonald's. I got a voucher for my troubles from the local franchise owner, who controlled several McDonald's, but not all of them, in my town. If the shop is locally owned, then complaining to corporate will put egg on local faces. If the shop is corporate-owned, good luck.

You could edit that to a 1,000-character complaint. You should. Submit it. You probably will get a voucher for free pizza.

The problem with dispelling the myth of "poor man's copyright" is that most debunkings, even that provided by USCO's FAQ, provide no example of how mailing yourself your own work could be used as fraud. I could mail myself an unsealed envelope stuffed with blank paper. When I get the envelope, I could wait until I see a published work that I want to claim as my own, remove the blank paper from the envelope, seal up the envelope, and then claim the postmark proves that I created the work, not the original author.

Opera is still around? I thought the fat lady had already sung for that browser. But I had it back when it was free. I thought it was great, except that it didn't have JavaScript support. Then they started charging, and IE went to free.

The high-priced and cheapest hotels could be called notels: There's no telling what you get for your money at the high-priced establishments, and there's no telling what you'll find in your room at the cheapest rates.

Obama could be the first post-American President.

Polygamy probably won't come back, legally, so one man can marry more than one woman. No, after gay marriage is legalized and becomes commonplace, bisexuals will begin to seek open marriages on the grounds that they should not have to deny one side of their sexuality in order to take advantage of legal marriage. Why should a bisexual be limited to marrying one man or one woman? He or she, they will say, should be allowed to marry both a man and a woman.

Yeah, a lot of people start blogs and realize later that they're not committed to being pretentiously opinionated, superfluously verbose gasbags after all.

I had a professor deduct points from one of my papers because I did not cite my source according to MLA standards. But I did, I told her, and cited the MLA Handbook. The MLA Handbook, which I had bought two semesters previous to her class, had been updated online by the MLA. I do not think I had access to this information, either, as a regular student. She did, because she was a professor. She did not back off her decision to ding my paper for citing something I had little way of knowing was an improper citation.

I bought a business-class laser printer years ago so I could print poetry booklets. An inkjet cost too much money in ink and too much time for printing. Plus the pages smudged with ink prints. I saved enough on ink cartridges to make up for the cost of the printer.

Maybe you should have stuck with the Mac Maxi.

I watched the Super Friends, He-Man, Shera, Bravestar, Voltron (both series), Thundercats, G.I.Joe, Transformers, even Gobots. I never could stand Captain Planet.

I am conflicted on this one. A finder(s) of an orphaned work may have no idea how old a work is. How does one know when the copyright expires if the author cannot be found? We deal with this in our society all the time. Leave your bank account dormant long enough, and money will be deducted. Drop off the map long enough, and you can be declared legally dead.

On the other hand, copyright law already has specifications for anonymous works. The law mandates deposit, too, although I have never heard of a case where mandatory deposit has been enforced. So why should it be incumbent on the author to remain in reasonable contact with society? Also, what constitutes "contact"? The author of a popular work may be slammed with requests for permission. What if the author does not respond to emails and voicemails in a "reasonable" amount of time? Would the terms of service of a Web site constitute contact?

Some people may not understand why the Poor Man's Copyright does not work. Simply put, you could mail yourself an unsealed envelope, either empty, filled with blank paper, etc. Once it arrives, you can stuff anything you want into it, long after the post date, seal up the envelope, and then claim copyright to anything therein. So if you wrote something today that someone else likes, they could have an unsealed envelope from last year, print out your work, change the byline, seal it up, and then claim copyright ownership. This is why Poor Man's Copyright should not be enforced.

My site ranks well for many queries. I would like, though, something very simple: for all of my poems to be indexed so that people can find them. I know I am breaking one of Google's guidelines. My site's index has well more than 100 links. However, I read recently that this no longer really applies (according to a Google insider) becaue Google in the old days would index 100k of a page and leave out the rest. My index page is 28k.

I am concerned that splitting my index page into categories with separate sub-indices would damage the index page's relevancy. And if my new poems are not being indexed, how do I know the new sub-indices would be indexed? This is the only site I run. It is not like I am running a here-today, gone-tomorrow, monetized, self-help site. This is for posterity.

I've already filed a DMCA takedown notice with Google because another site is ranking almost as well as mine for a popular query...using MY poems. Another site is coming up the top ten results list using one of my poems, too. I don't want to mess with my site's internal structure too much, because then I might disappear from the top ten while these bozoes rank above me with my content.

I don't know whose advice is best on the issue of getting indexed and ranking. It seems no advice out there is guaranteed to work, even when Google insiders like Matts Cutts are the ones advising.

I tried out the URL-in-the-RSS trick. It worked. A scraper who republished my feed had the URL in it. I just did a search of the scraped content, though. The scraper's site's copy has been indexed by Google. My site's original copy is stuck in supplemental results. So much for Matt Cutts's trick.