Saturday, April 23, 2011

Web etiquette?

Although I'm pleased that there are 5,511 links to my site I am continually fascinated and sometimes a little annoyed that people are able to lift information or quote from my blog posts and place it on their website without advising me that they have used the information and, rather than acknowledging the source of the material they just simply provide a link. Sure, I do that too, but I at least mention the name of the author and website where the information emanated. I suppose website etiquette differs from person to person?
Google Analytics allows me to discover which websites have permanent links to posts on this blog and this morning I've found that a number of website are using the material or parts of the material, such as a short quote from my Andrew Bolt/Indigenous Australians is on the Culture Language website, however they don't mention my name just place the link. Other sites, such as Elevate Difference which have an excerpt of a review I did of Shannon Bell's book Fast Feminism at least name me as author and provide a link to the original article. Other sites, such as Omniars out of Italy has provided a permanent link to my article on the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini as does Syneme, who have used parts of my essay on Spectacle of the Mind performances and have provided a link to this blog. Life123 has also posted a link to my article on Carbon Tax. I'm amazed that my short article in which I mentioned the word crimethink actually ended up on the trend.tv -  http://trendr.tv/trend/crimethink site. I wondered why there were so many hits for my photo of Melbourne University students running naked through campus during Prosh Week last year and then I found this permanent link on connect.in.com 
which probably draws some viewers.
I still don't understand what the 110,000 impressions and 1,600 clicks on this blog mean for the past month, nor do I know why a robot.txt blocks entry to some of my blog posts.
I should just mention that although I having a bit of a whinge this morning I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon/evening birthday celebration yesterday and thanks to everyone who sent me happy birthday wishes.

6 comments:

  1. You can declare the way you want pages to be cited by others using the www standard copyrighting methods in a Creative Commons License.

    Where no preference is indicated linking is an acceptable way to quote, because it no only reveals original sources but makes them available in full.

    robot.txt is a file made available to search engines containing information about what should not be searched. It is honoured by most of the search engines around, but not all.

    Page impressions/clicks are metrics that count the number of times a website advertisement (or page) are viewed/clicked. See here

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  2. I've re-looked at what the robot.txt is not crawling and basically it's the labels. The robot doesn't want to spend time looking at material that is duplicated. Now I understand. I thought it was blocking people from seeing info in labels, but no, it's still able to crawl existing posts that labels refer to.

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  3. Oh, and thanks Steve but your email to me did not come up as a post, but I thank you for the valuable information.

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  4. Strangely enough your comment above come in as Spam?

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  5. I put a few links in the comment so yes not surprised it was flagged as spam. How did this comment do?

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  6. Your comment above appeared as normal (not spam), it must have been because of the links.

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