Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Yesterday I replied to the arguments made by people who want to reprint blog posts or RSS feeds in full, often without proper credit.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with others excerpting or discussing my posts – I wholeheartedly encourage that. That’s part of the natural beauty of the blogosphere. My problem is with people who reprint the entire post and pass it off as their content, without my permission and without proper attribution and links, or who use my content without my permission to improve their own standing with their readers or with the search engines.

So what’s the right way to republish an RSS feed or blog post? I suggest four guidelines:

1) If you want to reprint an entire post on your site with the purpose of populating your domain with good articles or sharing an interesting or useful article with your readers, simply ask permission first and always include a link back to the original post when permission is granted. If you need good content and don’t want to ask permission, go to a free articles directory; don’t poach articles from blogs.

2) If you want to discuss or respond to a post in an original post of your own, feel free to cut and paste snippets here and there, or to summarize the post in your own words, and always include a link back to the original post. This is extremely common and encouraged in the blogosphere. You can find examples of how others have used my posts in this way at Philanthropy Journal’s Give and Take, which I approve of 100%.

3) If you want to excerpt a post without any original writing of your own, feel free to use the first paragraph (or a small amount of teaser text — usually not more than 50-100 words) and then include a link back to the full, original post. Again, this is extremely common and generally encouraged.

4) If you want to use RSS to automatically add content to your site, like many news aggregator sites do, set up your pages to take only headlines or a limited number of characters or words from the top of the article. And yes, always include a link back to the original post! This is what Ogilvy PR does with my feed and the feeds of many others in our sector.

I’m not suggesting we stifle conversation. I am suggesting that if you want an online presence, you do the work of content creation yourself and not rip off your digital neighbors.

Do these guidelines make sense to you? Leave a comment and let me know.

An article from this blog was recently reprinted in an email newsletter and on a website without my permission and without a link back to this blog. The same thing has happened recently to a handful of blogging colleagues. Is that fair use or content theft? When and how is it OK to reprint information from blogs in your own newsletters, blogs, and websites?

The Arguments For and Against Copying Full Posts

Note: I am not talking about excerpting small sections of posts for discussion purposes; I’m talking about reprinting the entire piece as content on a website, etc.

Some will argue that content distributed in the blogosphere is different than material printed in other forms, like printed books or even websites. People who wouldn’t normally copy and reprint articles from those sources will copy and paste off of blogs willy-nilly. They seem to justify this behavior in one of two ways.

Their Argument: It’s the nature of the blogosphere. Blogs are the Wild West and anything goes. The normal rules of engagement don’t apply. Blogging is all about the decentralization and free-wheeling distribution of information and republishing posts is simply part of the culture.

My Response: In addition to being decentralized and free-wheeling, blogging is also highly personal. The journal format demands a first-person writing style. When you copy my content, you are getting more than words – you are also getting some of the personality that comes along with it. When you reprint full blog posts without permission and pass them off as original content for your newsletter or website, without ample credit and links back, it’s a form of identity theft. Instead of using my credit score, you are using my reputation.

Their Argument: If you use RSS, you want people to republish your posts. RSS means Real Simple Syndication. If you use it to distribute content from your blog, as nearly all bloggers do, that means you want people to have a real simple way to publish your content in other venues, just like all those national columnists who write articles that are then published in hundreds of newspapers across the U.S.

My Response: This line of reasoning is absurd. The method I choose to distribute articles to my readers, whether it be print newsletters, private email, RSS, FedEx, or carrier pigeon, does not affect my copyright. I wrote it; I own it. End of story. And let’s not forget, those syndicated columnists are paid for their work, and the more popular their columns are, the more they get paid.

To answer the question I posed at the top, reprinting entire posts without permission and proper attribution and links is content theft and a copyright violation. It’s a way to add quality content to your site without working or paying for it, but it’s also lazy and, I believe, illegal.

So what’s the right way to reuse someone’s blog post?

Coming Tomorrow: The Right Ways to Republish RSS and Reprint Blog Posts (Part 2)

I’ve played around with lots of different photo galleries, both free and for a fee, for both clients and for my personal blog, where I keep my far-flung family happy with lots of kid photos. I’ve decided that I like Shozam the best (formerly Web Gallery Wizard) and here’s why.

It gives me complete control over how the photos appear and offers several nice templates for the photo galleries. Some of them are a little cheesy, but most are tasteful templates that can work well with many website designs. It’s got a step-by-step process (Steps #1 - 6) that’s really easy to follow, so you don’t get lost in the process of moving your photos from your camera to the web. I don’t have to do anything to my photos before placing them into the program. It takes care of all the sizing, rotating, creating thumbnails, etc. Adding captions is simple and you can also add audio and video clips.

I also like that it comes in several different versions, allowing me to pick the version with the number of tools I needed, and not pay for the ones I don’t. I bought the advanced version for $99.99, and it’s the mid-range version. The Lite version (the most basic version) is $24.95. Naturally, I recommend that you start with the free trial. It will let you test drive the various options before you spend the cash, which is always nice. It took me awhile before I coughed up the money, but after trying several of the free or cheap solutions and being really unhappy in the end, I’m glad I spend the bucks to get the product that works for me.
If you know of a program that does all that Shozam does for the same price or less, let me know by leaving a comment.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for March 12 (always a must-read e-newsletter) covers “10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities.” The tips are focused on ROI — return on investment — for commercial sites, but many of the tips are applicable to nonprofits too. Here are a few of my favorites, with some comments.

– Publish an email newsletter, if you aren’t already. It’s the perfect way to stay connected with someone who has visited your website. Make the sign-up form highly visible (include it in your template so it appears on every major page) and keep the form simple (don’t ask for a life history — name and email should do it). Email newsletters are cheap to distribute and as Jakob points out, they help liberate your site from being dependent on search engines.

– Differentiation and comparisons. Jakob talks about products and services, but the concept applies to nonprofits too. How does your nonprofit and what you do vary from what other similar organizations are doing? Website visitors want to know they are in the right place and how your work is the same or different from groups they are already familiar with.

For example, my husband works for the Conservation Trust for North Carolina. People always want to know if his organization is like the Trust for Public Land or The Nature Conservancy. While they all work in land conservation, they come at it with different priorities and approaches. TPL cares more about public parklands, TNC cares more about wildlife habitat, and CTNC cares more about protecting farmland and scenic byways from development. Their websites are fairly clear about these distinctions. If your organization is in a similar situation, clear up the confusion for your site visitors.

–Support for reordering (or for nonprofits, renewing). It annoys me when I can’t renew my nonprofit memberships or annual support online. I really like when I can login and the site automatically fills in data like my address. It’s a great timesaver.

Create a valuable site for your visitors by giving them the information they want, letting them save time by working online, and making it easy to stay in touch with you.

Website Magazine started appearing in my mailbox a few months ago, and I’m not sure where they got my name, but I’m glad they did. I do 90% of the work on the various websites I run, but I have no serious webmastering training. I learn as I go, like many nonprofit communications staff, and this magazine is a great resource. I flip through it the second I see it in the mail pile, which is very high praise given the size of my mail pile.

The latest issue described in very clear terms how to set up a page redirect for the search engines when you change the URL of a page on your website, which we all need to know how to do. Previous issues have included easy-to-understand articles on design trends, podcasting and more. It’s a great resource for accidental webmasters and best of all, it’s free!

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