360Digest

Rain City Guide rags on PubSub’s list because the Seattle P.I.’s Real Estate blog keeps coming up on top, ahead of them, Grow-a-Brain and the Zillow blog. I dunno….. I kind of like it! As a matter of fact, it’s one of my favorite lists (tee-hee!)

Bloodhound Blog has a nice post about blogs that feed the hungry mind. He mentions yours truly as having a “serious mind. Not dour or joyless, but never frivolous or shallow.” I’m flattered. But obviously, he’s never seen this.

I got a heads up about the Holm Team website. Anytime you use their real estate search, and click on “more details”, it frames the results with my name and photo. Ssshhhh! Don’t tell them! The site has a -0 page rank, but it’s a hoot to think that anytime one of their clients searches for real estate, my name, photo, website address, email and telephone number comes up and it looks like one of my listings. (I’m not sure if they stole the code or they just have a lazy website developer… Let’s not tell them. Let’s just wait and see how long it takes for them to notice.)

That reminds me of a time that an agent took Debbie Ferrari’s rotating MLS Search Image, and drew it directly onto his site from her image URL, of a flipping MLS search.

According to Debbie’s husband, William Koelzer, this agent blatently and obviously took the gif from Debbie’s site, so they loaded up THIS message to that URL:

“THIS agent IS STEALING
MY MLS rotating IMAGE artwork
from DEBBIEFERRARI.COM“

Several days went by. Then they got more aggressive. Gene Carey of View MLS Homes in Northern Illinois, made them an even better gif to replace that one with:

So, any visitor to his site saw that message! It was on their for several days before someone called it to the agent attention. (For a cached view, click HERE.) Sweet.

Arizona Realtor Alice Held of Come2AZ.com has had her cactus-themed Web stolen and her content used almost verbatim without permission more than once, and she added some very scary “legal stuff” to her website, complete with her attorney’s name and contact info, in case you “forget” and lift some of her content.

Your site is typically considered copyrighted by putting the appropriate copyright notice ( © Copyright, year, by your name. All rights reserved) on each page. However, unless you register your content with the Copyright Office, you have no recourse but a “cease and desist” letter when people infringe on your material.

Wonder how you can check and see if anyone’s stealing your stuff? Check out CopyScape.com

Have copyrights for the pictures on your web site? Don’t want visitors to be able to save them? Visit “Right Click Disabler“.

This whole blogging phenomenon is fueled by content on other blogs…. we use them for inspiration and for jumping off points to continue and further the rant. But there’s a difference between being inspired and just stealing content without credit. One would be advised to know the difference!