Astrology, Copyright and Plagiarism

By Tony Vowles

Blogging is a personal and very rewarding pursuit. Technically it is easy for someone with basic IT skills to produce a website that appears very slick – beautifully designed templates can be slotted in at the click of a few buttons with no need for design or programming skills. All you need to do is author content. This is where the joy of writing comes in – the imagination, the literary skill and the hours poring over content. Personally, I hardly ever read what other astrology bloggers have written on a topic until I’ve written my own – I don’t want to be sidetracked by something mentioned. I also don’t want to subconsciously take it in and end up repeating it. My work is my life blood – my soul is in there and I know it is the same for many others.

So it should come as no surprise that the idea of your work being plagiarised feels almost the same as someone breaking into your house! The question is, what can/do you do about it? I think it’s important to try and distinguish between what is a simple mistake – a lack of understanding of copyright, wanting to share your material (but doing it badly), and outright copying for personal gain. Both happen, perhaps more frequently than we realise. I’ve worked in IT long enough to know that sometimes people do and think the most ridiculous things – believing that a wireless mouse and flat screen monitor speeds up a PC for instance! It’s easy to see how copyright might be a completely alien concept to someone like that – in these cases a gentle reminder should be enough. You never know, the exchange could turn into a friendship – after all, it is nice to know that someone values what you’ve written and want to share it with their network.

So, what of the other type? You’ve no doubt seen them – an exploitation of the ease of creating websites by producing something that has no heart and soul – no personal investment – that investment is being taken from you! There seems to be a great many of these around and from what I can discern their interest is in receiving revenue from ad clicks and bundled offerings. With such a lack of investment from the owners I suspect many wouldn’t last too long. However, it isn’t difficult to create lots of them, exploit keywords for Google placement, and let the pennies roll in – like a cash cow.

We all have to consider how we’d like our content represented – external links provide clickthroughs to our site (which is good) but does it portray our brand in the way we intention? If it doesn’t, then it’s worth considering that our product could be weakened in some way, despite the extra traffic.

Copyright violation is against the law and we do have the ability to close down sites if push comes to shove. Check out this Wikipedia article on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google Analytics helps – we can see an amazing amount of detail about traffic to our site – if you’re not using it then you should be! There are also varying levels of copyright services available to aid us. Copyscape offers a free service where you can input the URL of your page and it scours the internet looking for duplicated content. They also provide a paid premium service for more sophisticated protection.

So, there’s much to consider with copyright and plagiarism. It is complicated; the law is tricky and differs across boundaries. It isn’t always black and white but there are free tools at our disposal to help fight it. If you know of other tools and utilities then fill up the comments section here with your ideas!

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Hailing from the UK, Tony calls himself an amateur astrologer and social networker. He has been studying Astrology for about 20 years on and off and also has a background and interest in Martial Arts and Zen Buddhism. His astrology blog is aptly named The Astrology Blog
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Help Your Readers Find Your Old Blog Posts

By Jeffrey Kishner

Blogs are designed to publish an author’s most recent entry at the top of the page, pushing older posts further down the page, and eventually into the archives. This format is great if you’re writing a diary or a news blog, because your readers want to know about the latest happenings in your life or niche.

However, this format does not always work for astrology blogs. Astrology, of course, is dependent upon time, so if you’re only writing about the most recent astrological events (lunations, ingresses, mundane aspects) then your readers will want to go to the home page of your blog to view whatever has been most recently posted. But if you write about the art of astrological interpretation, you risk having some of your best material buried in the archives, where your readers will not be able to find it.

How do you help your readers find your old content? There are several options:

Tag Your Posts

This is the easiest solution. If you’re writing about the current Saturn square Pluto aspect, you can tag your post “Saturn,” “Pluto” and “mundane astrology.” If you’re writing about the love styles of Capricorn men, tag it “Capricorn” and “relationships.” The point is to help your readers easily find your old posts by topic, so don’t go overboard. If you have a tag cloud in your blog’s sidebar that has 200 words, you’re likely to overwhelm your reader, so don’t include a tag for every single celebrity you write about. Keep it simple!

Include Related Posts at the End of Each Blog Entry

An easy way to let your readers explore old content is to include a short list of posts that are thematically related to the one they’re reading. If you’ve written some great articles about the nodes, be sure to include them in your most recent post about them. Some blog platforms have plugins that automatically generate these for you, but the plugin will not do as good a job as you will, so just search through your archives and include your three best posts in a bullet-pointed list.

Link to Old Posts From Within Your Article

Why wait for the reader to finish reading your post to find more relevant articles? You can find terms or phrases in your copy and hyperlink them to stuff in your archives. Be mindful of best practices: Don’t write something like, “You can read my other article about this here.” Rather, you can write, “In my previous post about the South Node in Leo…”

Create Special Pages That Link to Your Best Posts

Although a reader can click through your archives, the experience looking for a specific post can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you’ve written a whole bunch of articles about a specific topic, create a page on your blog (if your blog platform allows) and include a short introduction with a list of links. I do this for Sasstrology; each zodiac sign has its own dedicated page with links to nearly all the blog posts about that sign. (For example, see Scorpio.)

Include a Search Box

Your blogging software may natively come with a search box, but it may not do a terribly good job. You can use services like Lijit or Google Custom Search to help your readers get a Google search listing of whatever your reader is looking for.

Widgets Galore

Depending on your blog platform, you may be able to add a widget that features your most popular posts (and other variations, like “most commented,” “most visited,” etc.). Your most popular posts may not be your best posts – the ones you really want to feature – so use these widgets with caution.
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About the Author

Jeffrey Kishner is editor/publisher of Sasstrology. He is also a regular contributor at AOL Horoscopes. Jeffrey is available for professional consultations regarding WordPress blogs and social media optimization. You can contact him at jeffreykishner@gmail.com.
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Why Technorati Now Disappoints

While it is often said, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, Technorati’s new business plan cries out for a critique. Once the Mecca of blogging enthusiasts across the net, systemic changes to social media site Technorati’s mission has inexorably altered the role it will play in the blogosphere.

Technorati was once the place where a new blog could get listed, have its feeds pulled, and have a chance at developing an audience. In addition, links to the blog site would be listed, building what Technorati called “authority” on its pages. It was a level playing field for all bloggers.

Now Technorati has rolled out a new game plan, one of which new blogs are definitely not a part despite Technorati’s glowing description of the new roll out. Gone is the option to “ping” your content to show up on Technorati’s feed. RSS feeds exist for only those blogs with larger authority. And in the new rollout, many blogs with established authority found those numbers disappeared from their listing. If you score low on authority your content will be pinged every month or so from Technorati itself. Where once links has a shelf life of six months on Technorati for authority scoring purposes, now the shelf life is a single month. In a business where blogs can be birthed and wither within that time frame from a lack of readership, Technorati will hardly be helpful to a new blogger and present bloggers with smaller authority are not being served as well. The only blogs that continue benefit from being listed on Technorati are established blogs with an authority ranking above 100.

As new bloggers look for options in building readership, Technorati might just find itself not just in the cold, but frozen out of dynamic new offerings by the narrowing of their vision.

Social Media: Using Twitter Trending Topics to Boost Readership

Like most of you, I’ve been ignoring the Trending Topics on the sidebar of my Twitter page. In a real Homer Simpson moment, I hit my head and moaned “doh!” when I realized the opportunities missed by not utilizing this free and totally useful tool.

Looking at October 21sts’ trending topics I saw two related topics to posts that were already online. One was “Halloween” the other was the “Google Wave”. While I haven’t written anything on the Google Wave itself, Astroblogging has two posts on using Google Analytics. No matter that these posts were already in the blogosphere, people want to know about these things NOW. So it was off to the tinyurl page to make bite sized Twitter friendly links to the posts and up they go.

To get your two seconds of fame on Twitter make sure that you post tags about your content. Tags are very easy, the sign “#” signifying a tag plus your keyword. For A Neptune Tale: The Devil You Know the tag looks like this #astrology, #Halloween.

Let me know if this works for you.

SEO: The News Cycle and How it Affects Readership of Your Posts

It’s three AM. Do you know where your daily post is today?

Rolling out of bed at 8:00 or 9:00 AM, downing your cup of morning coffee and thinking about what your post might be for the day is not going to help you get the most readers. In fact, if you do not have your post up before 8:00 AM, you’ve lost half your traffic for the day. Let me explain.

In the labor intensive traditional print newsroom, the reporters come in at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, have a meeting with their editor to decide the on stories to be worked on, do research, attend meetings and start working on their stories. Incredibly, and most of you do not know this, they may also have their eye on a television to keep track of the news stories cycling in news stream. By 10:00 PM if the reporters make the deadline, everything is written, the pages set up, and the whole thing is sent electronically to make the plates for the presses. If everything goes well, (and many days it does not) then your daily newspaper rolls off the presses before 1:00 AM. After some time spent in what is called the mailroom, the papers are inserted, bundled and sent off to their ultimate destination to arrive at your door early morning. This is the origin of the modern news day and for the first half of the last century it was the only game in town. Enter television and the advent of the instant news stream. Over the next two decades, the six o’clock and 11 o’clock news were expanded to more frequent offerings as broadcasting companies were faced with filling an expanding broadcast schedule with cost effective content. News broadcast inventors like Don Hewitt brought television news from staid “talking head” formats to dynamic presentations. By the seventies, news shows were on a constant cycle of morning, noon, evening and late night shows. Following in the footsteps of the morning newspaper delivery, the morning news became the kick-off of the daily cycle as reporters followed the development of a story through out the day. If there are no new developments viewer interest wanes and the story dies.

Whether we like it or not, the four generations alive today have been fed at the teat of this news cycle. It is a part of our daily lives and it what we expect. By the time we are off to work we’ve digested the first parts of the daily news feed. We don’t have time during the day to absorb anything else. Regardless of whether or not you have the best content in the world just if you haven’t posted early in the morning you missed the readership boat for the day.

The moral of this post is that while blogging allows you the luxury of posting whenever you like, if you want to build your readership, you will have your post up at the beginning of the day to capture the greatest number of readers.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.

Choosing Your Platform

It is recommended by experts in the field that if you have a web site already, you should add a blogging component to your web site. Word Press is a popular blogging platform that you can install free on your web site. Go to WordPress.org to get the download to install. You have a wide range of free templates to choose from, or you can get the person who set up your web site design to match the blog design to your site.

You can set up a free account if you don’t have a web site at Word Press.com. With a range of templates, some with uploadable headers, you can set up a professional looking blog. Another popular platform is Google’s Blogspot. The advantage to Google is its relative ease of use, plus having the advantage of combing a Google e-mail address with your site.

Other free platforms are Vox, Live Journal, My Space, and Stumble Upon.

Choosing Your Platform

It is recommended by experts in the field that if you have a web site already, you should add a blogging component to your web site. Word Press is a popular blogging platform that you can install free on your web site. Go to WordPress.org to get the download to install.  You have a wide range of free templates to choose from, or you can get the person who set up your web site design to match the blog design to your site.

You can set up a free account if you don’t have a web site at Word Press.com. With a range of templates, some with uploadable headers, you can set up a professional looking blog. Another popular platform is Google’s Blogspot. The advantage to Google is its relative ease of use, plus having the advantage of combing a Google e-mail address with your site.

Other free platforms are Vox, Live Journal, My Space, and Stumble Upon.

Starting As An Astrology Blogger

As an astrologer, I’ve written a weekly column for the past few years for a local publication. As fun as it was to write a column weekly, I wanted to expand my audience. Searching the web I found this ad:

451 Press is always looking for bright, talented writers who want to have their voices heard. We are looking for writers with unique voices to contribute to our growing network of blogs. Our blogs cover a wide range of topics. If you have a passion for a subject then we just might have a place for you.

One of the subjects they need a writer: astrology! Perfect. I filled out the application, attached a couple of writing samples and waited about two weeks before I heard back. 

Thank you for your recent application to write for 451 Press. After carefully reviewing your application we think you would make a great fit for our Astrology blog.

What? That easy? No interview? No request for further samples? Whoa!

But, in going through the next step of the process, The Weblog Agreement, I soon learned a bit of what I was in for. I was to provide content and artwork, post a least five times a week, with appropriate links to other web sites and get this, put all this up myself on a Word Press template, putting in some information using HTML. 

That was the least of it. Blogging, as it turned out, is more than just putting up content and having a host of people find your wonderful web page. And unfortunately, belonging on a network didn’t give me an instant readership. As I found out, astrology is a very small niche. Very few astrology blogs gain the kind of readership that more generic blogs garner. You have to work at bringing in those readers.

Still, if you have a passion for writing about astrology, there is no better way to get your writing out there. You can post what you want to, on any subject you care too write about. But blogging is more than writing content. You have many decisions to make before you lay down your first words. Where do you want to blog? How do you want your blog to look? Once you set up your blog then you need to work on drawing in readers. How are you going to promote it? For those people with few technical skills these can seem like daunting tasks. In the posts that follows we’ll take on those subjects and more.