The Web Authority

I just shopped for a new cell phone yesterday. Wow is there some eye candy out in the cell phone marketplace, but do you really need all that stuff?

First, I have to say that it used to be (well two years ago) that you could get a pretty hot phone for $100 with your two year contract. Now the starting price is over $250 with a two year contract. As I looked at the phones I thought do I want to be on the Web, do I want people to email me on my phone? You know what, I simply do not want to be that connected!

I am busy enough without being out and about away from the office that I want clients and customers to call me anytime and anywhere. I need some downtime and so does my family. So I have made the decision that although many may disagree, that I do not want to browse the Web and get email on my phone. When I am out of the office after a 50 hour work week, I need to be just that “out of the office”.

So my new phone is my old phone, music enabled, photo enabled, but not a browser or email application. I am letting my 18 year old get the new hot phone and then he can pay for his own Internet access. :0)

We hear this all the time from website owners. I found the perfect picture, just take it and put it on my website.

It is important for clients and web professionals to know that taking an image or content from another site is a copyright infringement. You can not just right click and make something yours! Everything on the Web belongs to someone. Even if there isn’t a copyright notification at the bottom of the web page, the item can only be used with permission.

When we do images for websites we pay for the photos that we use. We typically use iStockPhotos and for $1 own a license to use a photo one time on a website. For each time we use the photo, we download and pay for it. We also use Microsoft’s free photos from the clip art gallery. The license on these images states that you can use them for all uses except for the creation of logos.

So don’t cheat, don’t steal get your images from a legitimate source. Remember even images on Google images are copyrighted! The biggest suggestion we can offer is that when you are using images and content for your commercial website use, the rules are different and the bar is higher, you can simply not afford to snatch something that belongs to someone else.

It used to be that what you read on a blog was an honest personal viewpoint, and in some cases, that is still how it is. Today however, you’d better start to be more careful about what you trust when you read a message on a blog.

Blogging has gone mainstream and when anything goes mainstream it is suddenly used for spin, advertising, and invisible veiled agendas. We are seeing an increasing use of paid advertising posts in the blogosphere without you, the reader, knowing that the writer is being paid to give a good review or supposed personal testimony on a product. Not only has that sabotaged the blogosphere and compromised some bloggers who were not forthright about their sponsorship, but it has made all blogs now suspect of spin and a lack of sincerity. Is there a hidden message behind many blogs? You bet there is, and I am bemoaning the loss of innocence of a great medium.

We have never participated in blogging schemes to create spin or bogus testimonies for our clients and never will. We are simply not driven by money in what we do. The majority of our clients use our ghost blogging services to create great search engine friendly content for their websites as an effort to get the “leg up” on others when it comes to organic placement. This is what we do and what we love.

As I work with the blog players and blog owners behind the scenes, I have seen it all! So my word to you is, be careful about what you read on a blog, can you trust it? Weigh the message before you embrace it against what you read on other blogs, and don’t make a decision or base a judgement on a blog post that you have read. You may be simply be reading a spinmaster’s blog message being used to shape a viewpoint or to create viral marketing on the Web.