Posts

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Blogs and Copyright Issues

This is a good article to read from the Blog Herald. The article speaks about potential problems of copyright infringement when bloggers embed YouTube videos. But should you believe it?

My take on it is this. If you post your video on YouTube, you are wanting others to see and to share your video content otherwise you would not upload it. Same goes for Google Video. If you want to control your video then you simply do not load it onto Google Video or on YouTube. Very simple.

I find it hard to believe that a lawyer for a person who felt that their video had been infringed upon would contact and try to sue people who have posted a YouTube video uploaded by their client. The issue may exist in the a totally litigious minded group on the Ethernet, but in the real world come on!

I am a big stickler on copyright issues, but I think that this issue and the warning flags issued are not in the scope of real world use.

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Unique Sessions More Important Than Page Views

Many clients have thought that page views was a measure of success in website traffic, but with new technology in use like AJAX, page views are not considered a real measure of site popularity.

I have always monitored unique sessions as my benchmark for success on a site. Page views may be preferable for some as it is typically a higher number and so looks better, but in truth, sessions is a more accurate figure.

Yahoo News which is linked to our post title discusses how even Nielsen/NetRatings is changing how they monitor sites and dropping page views as their measure of site popularity and moving to unique sessions. This is in part due to the introduction of new Web technologies which have significantly skewed page view results.

Personally I think that it is about time. Utilizing page views as your key metric simply does not make sense. I like to watch unique sessions and then average time on a site or average number of pages per unique visitor. I feel that this gives a more rounded and accurate view of a site’s popularity.

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New Blog Template for Web-World Watch

I love the widgets that the new Blogger hosted on Blogspot provides, but I have to say that there is no replacement for the search engine benefits and ability to create a template for your blog that matches your site seamlessly. I have just made a new blog template for my Web-World Watch blog. Click the post title and you can see it.

Blogspot hosting does not seriously affect your search engine placement, but Blogspot blogs do not show under your main domain in the search engine results either. There are good reasons to use a Blogspot blog and good reasons to use the old Blogger with custom FTP blogging.

My personal preference is custom FTP blogging on the old blogger. Eventually Blogger will work out a way I am sure to get the best of both worlds, but until then you just have to choose. – cool widgets and flexibility or better search engine placement with your domain and no widgets.

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Our New Blog Template

Check out our new blog template for Web-World Watch. I was testing to see just how difficult it was to create a seamless blog template and came up with this new look for our blog. I’ve tried to include all the great features from our old blog, but without the smack you in the face monetising links.

I have tried monetizing my blog and now have decided that it is simply just not worth featuring the real estate and so have relegated any money links to totally subordinate positions. I think that our new look is cleaner and doesn’t distract from the content.

Let me know what you think?