"Blogtyrant" 's niche blogging advocacy, with a warning about copyrighted photos

“Blogtyrant” (Ramsay Taplin), while recently on his own vacation in native Australia and noting the importance of trees in fighting climate change, has put out a couple more important articles on blogging.

The first of these is “What to do when your child says they want to be a blogger”.  (Note the “they” – plural – yet that is becoming accepted English as a gender neutral singular pronoun;  I prefer “she” if I want to sound inclusive enough, without really implying binary-ness).  My own mother would not have approved in her old age when I moved back in, but I don’t think she really understood.

More critical is “11 Beginner Mistakes that Cripple Blogs intheir First Year”.  I can’t adhere to 1 and 2 very well, which I think really apply to niche blogging  -- and what matters there is that the underlying small business is successful (and the blog serves the business).  I don’t run email lists, and I guess that means I’m not the “GO TO” (no COBOL please) person for anyone’s practical needs.  There are reasons why that may change soon if I can combine others to cover some critical topics (like infrastructure security from foreign threats).  But #9 (not the same as the DC bar of that name) is about the risk of lawsuit for copyright infringement especially for photo and video infringements.

  

There’s a personal story of a photo copyright infringement here from Ron Loren worth citing. In general, realize that some photo collections online are copyrighted and the photos may not be used free.  Some publications actually sell rights to use photos as part of their income (DC’s gay paper Metro Times does that) so they depend on being paid for their business model.  It is possible that embedded photos could cause a problem, but less likely than one on your own server. Photos of copyrighted material might lead to problems.  I doubt that photos of ads like in Metro stations would (you’re promoting them for free).  A few years ago bloggers were getting sued by a “troll” named Righthaven for using articles and images from plaintiff’s small newspapers. The fact that a service provider does a DMCA Safe Harbor takedown does not protect the blogger from a later lawsuit or demand for payment. 

Here's another piece, from a UK site called Connotations, on how to write an effective blog posting that gets the desired attention.  Sounds like an English theme.