The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners are a bit confused about why Google developed the Country Code based "blogspot.com" aliases - and what effects the aliases have. Of the people who know about the worldwide distribution of the Country Code aliases, not everybody understands their actual purpose. And, not everybody sees aliasing , even when they live in countries outside the USA. Similar to the earlier confusion about our email addresses displayed in the navbar , a few blog owners, publishing "mybloggerblog.blogspot.com" (for instance) see their blog displayed as "mybloggerblog.blogspot.co.uk" (when they live in the UK), and think that the whole world now knows that this blog, "mybloggerblog.blogspot.com", is published by someone in the UK.

Occasionally, we will see an ominous problem report in BHF: Something Is Broken Somebody is posting articles in my blog, but it's not me! When we see this, the first thing that comes to mind is unwanted comments, generally when comments are not actively moderated. That's not always the case , though.

The MPAA / RIAA stranglehold, in the USA, on the electronic consumer, may have reached a peak with their ability to coerce the US Congress to pass the DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, thought by some to be the most noxious bit of legislation since the British Tea Act of 1773, may have a valid use, though. It's possible that the DMCA Violation Form , which Blogger / Google provides, may be useful in reporting content that's been pirated, personally, from you. If you believe that your pictures, and / or articles , are being unjustly copied within Blogger / Google hosting space, you may get some relief from reporting this as a DMCA Violation . Note, however, that a DMCA Violation report is a serious complaint , and can have repercussions both upon the source and target of the complaint. Please note that you will be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that a product or activity is infringing your copyrig...

Every week, we see the naive query How do I prevent my pictures from being copied? and this, I regret to say, is a magic trick that has yet to be perfected. Others ask Why does Google let people publish blogs with pictures stolen from other blogs? and here, we have to note that Google has no interest in controlling blog content, beyond the limits of their own TOS regulations .

Every day or so, we see reported from concerned bloggers, about unknown content in their blogs. Where did those ads come from? I didn't add them! or How do I keep this other blogger from posting porn links in my blog? As we add content to our blogs, and make them fun, interesting, and shiny, to attract readers, we risk adding undesirable content. This is a constant problem.

Blogger is a one button blog / web site publishing system. It has no sophisticated Content Management capabilities. It's limited to 100 blog members / readers , and the member list is maintained using the Permissions wizard. It provides no activity log, showing maintenance or updates. This may present a challenge, in a team blog with multiple administrators. It provides no archiving of multiple historical versions of a given post. It provides no backup and restore capabilities, beyond the known manual processes. It provides no ability to transfer ownership of multiple blogs between one account and another, besides one blog at a time . It has no ability to allow multiple authors to work, simultaneously, on one post without the possibility of the work done by one overlaying another. It provides no ability for team members to use page / post editor for page / post development - and allow an administrator to oversee and moderate before a page / post is published. Limited pre p...

So you put a lot of time and effort into making a blog that's entertaining and useful . To keep it that way, you regularly watch to see who's viewing your blog , so you can keep your content useful . And one day, you check out your incoming hits log, and you find a visitor to another web site, with content identical to yours. Except for the ads, or other amenities. My content, their web site! My work, their ads??!! Everybody who publishes interesting or useful content will find this happen, at some time or another.