Associated Content’s $5000 Contest Coming 3 June 2008

Could you use $5000?

That’s what AC is offering. One day and one day only, June 3^rd, AC will be holding the ultimate Call 4 Content. Once the topic is announced, authors will have from 9am until midnight (Eastern Time) to compose and submit their article. The prize is $5000.

Crack your knuckles, adjust your ergonomic chair and dust off your keyboard (compressed air recommended) because there can be only one. Details as they unfold.

Edit:
The official contest rules.

Associate Content Tip of the Day 17 Mar 2008: Dealing with Plagiarism

Here is Associated Content’s official policy on pursuing plagiarism:

Here’s some clarification that we hope will help any CP who finds their content has been posted/published/reprinted/etc. on a third-party site that isn’t a partner site of AC’s:FACT: If we grant reprint permission for a piece of content to ANY other site, AC will always notify the CP.

For EXCLUSIVE content:
Associated Content is the copyright owner of all exclusive content. While a CP may be the original author, Associated Content is the only entity that can act legally on behalf of the content in question. If you find an exclusive article on an inappropriate site, please contact AC’s Designated Agent at designated_agent@associatedcontent.com. Include the link to the offending website, as well as a link to your content on AC. Only Associated Content has the legal right to send an effective DMCA takedown notice to an offending company/website. We handle these types of cases multiple times every week, so the Designated Agent will be your best step. Any DMCA complaint that you send to a third-party will be defective, as you are no longer the copyright owner.

For NON-EXCLUSIVE content:
Unfortunately, because the content in question was licensed to AC on a non-exclusive basis, we have no way of knowing whether the offending site published the content before or after it was published on AC. Accordingly, we will not necessarily take any action against the site. (At our discretion, AC may send a Cease and Desist order, but we are not required to.) However, since you [the CP] retained the rights to the content, you are free to enforce your rights against the inappropriate third-party for copyright infringement. Depending on where you find your content reprinted, there should always be a contact or link that every company supplies for copyright infringement complaints that looks similar to our “Copyright Infringement?” link at the bottom of each page.

What I get from this is if you submitted your article as an AC exclusive, AC owns the rights and will pursue the matter for you. You only need to report it to their Designated Agent and they’ll take if from there. If you submitted the article as non-exclusive, you still own the rights and AC is under no obligation to help you. You should take action to rectify the situation.

Doing this yourself can be difficult especially if the thief is a blogger. My recent experience is pretty typical when a blogger steals your article. With no other way to contact them, I was reduced to leaving comments on their blog. After receiving no response for a couple of days, I resorted to reporting them to their host. The host, which happened to be WordPress, took swift action to suspend the blog.

It is important to note, I used all the magic DMCA words when I contacted WordPress. If you are going to pursue copyright infringement on your own, you will need to be very specific with URLs, publishing dates, and use the right language. Under the law, if you follow the DMCA legalese, the responsible party must follow up.

Because of my recent saga, I found a great resource, Plagiarism Today. It has lots of information on how to deal with plagiarists. There is also a very helpful Stock Letter section. Simply fill in the blanks and you have an officially worded DMCA cease and desist letter.

The really hard part about enforcing your copyright is finding out that you’ve been plagiarized. You could pay for a service like Copyscape if that is worth your money, but there is a cheesy free way to follow your work. Set up a Google alert for a key phrase or two from your article. This will notify you if the phrase shows up elsewhere on the web.

The goal is to find wholesale plagiarism. Finding just a except falls under the fair use rules. Don’t freak out if you find one paragraph which cites you as the source or links back to your original article. That’s a good thing. However, if you do find a paragraph or two which someone incorporated into their own work and they didn’t cite you, that is plagiarism.

Good Luck and happy hunting.

Associated Content Promotes MySpace Spamming: They Didn’t Think This Through

Category: Associated Content Boneheaded Idea

UPDATED:  Please see the comments for AC response to this post.

Part of the AC Newsletter for 13 March 2008 was some less-than-helpful tips for promoting your article using MySpace.

Make friends with a friend adder bot. This tool collects a list of MySpace users and then sends out requests for you.

This is an incredibly bad idea.

1. It’s against MySpaces TOS. If caught, you’ll have your account deleted.
2. It’s spam. The adding friends part isn’t, but when you start blasting out bulletins, you’ll get blocked.
3. It’s going to give you and Associated Content a black eye.

My jaw hit the floor after the implications of these suggestions sank in. Please do not take AC up on this. Earn your MySpace friends and you will build a long-term, loyal reader base. Scoop and spam random strangers will get you dropped from all circles.

Just one more thing. This was in the AC Newsletter, too:

Make your MySpace page work for you by using colors, fonts and pictures to showcase your content or use the AC-themed layout.

You MySpacers need to open your eyes. I’m starting to think they are closed because you don’t see how butt-ugly your pages are. Tone it down. Stop with the flashing crap. You’re giving people seizures. Pick colors you can see. Stop putting lavender text on a pink background.

Bone up on some basic web concepts such as correct color combination and white space. Spend a few minutes at Web Pages That Suck. It’s a site that teaches you decent design concepts by showing you what other sites have done poorly. Don’t be surprised if you run into a few examples drawn from MySpace.

Good luck and don’t spam.

Associate Content Tip of the Day 27 Feb 2008: 6 Common Internet Writing Mistakes

Nannette Richford put together Six Common Internet Writing Mistakes. These are not the usual cast of characters. You’ll find some real food for thought in this article. Think of it as web writing 201.

5. Do you have the mistaken notion that crafting well-written and insightful content is all that is needed to attract readers? It isn’t. You need to do your homework and find a way to draw readers to your content. “If you build it, they will come.” Only works in the movies. In real life, you need to build a pathway for them to follow. Think of search engines as a path leading to your content. Even the work of literary geniuses will never be read if there is no pathway to their work.

This and 5 more great tips await. >> Read More >>

Associated Content Announces Winners of 2nd Annual People’s Media Awards

Associated Content announced the winners of its 2nd annual, $10,000 awards today. Most of the awards are based on the amount of traffic generated for the site, but hidden within this years winners were a few gems of outstandingly well-written web content. The winners were:

Content Producer of the Year
Pam Gaulin writes on a variety of topics, has a tremendous following of readers, and promotes the general welfare of her fellow writers with site like AC Writers at Ning. On a personal note, Pam had my vote from the start for top honors.
Pam Gaulin’s CP page
Prize: $2,000

Best of AC Text
Michelle Devon. Don’t stop with just “Michy’s” winning article. She has a couple of hundred and everyone is worth the read. Beyond her fantastic writing abilities, she goes out of her way to mentor new writers and spread the wealth of writing opportunities with her own site, Accentuate.
Confessions of a Writer: The Ugly Truth About Being a Writer
Prize: $1000

Rosa Hayes wrote this astounding, personal piece about the loss of her son. Her other articles cover a spectrum of topics and always have great information.
Oklahoma City Mother Recounts the Death of Her Son
Prize: $1000

Jean Riva. I found Jean through another site before I found her writings. Her articles are full of the love and frustrations of life. When she is not caring for her husband, she spends her time writing insightful, humorous articles and spreading awareness of language aphasia.
How My Husband’s Stroke Changed My Life
Prize: $1000

Best of AC Video
Aaron Jaffe
Diamonds Are Not a Girl’s Best Friend
Prize: $1000

Best of AC Audio
Ken McCoy
Ken McCoy Entertainment Report
Prize: $1000

Best of AC Slideshow
Aly Adair
Aly’s Aesthetic Glory
Prize: $1000

Top Performing* Text
Neph
Webkinz World Secret Cheat Codes
Prize: $1000

Top Performing* Richmedia
Kelly Fleming
Craiglist: There is Something for Everyone
Prize: $1000

1,000 other members of the Associated Content community also were given recognition (i.e. no money) based on the number of hits generated for the site. Congratulations to all of this years winners.

*based on hits.

Associated Content Steps Up Plagiarism Checks

Associated Content allows contributors to submit articles for both review and immediate publication. With either submission type, more so with the un-reviewed, plagiarism is always a problem. This is true of any site. If VentureBeat is on target, Associated Content has just raised the stakes for those unscrupulous people who would rip-off a legitimate author’s work.

VentureBeat reports that AC has added Attributor software to their process to scan the web for plagiarized articles. Unfortunately, many contributors use articles that they have previously put on the web as re-publish fodder for AC. This becomes a sticky situation for software that only matches chucks of text.

In the past, some AC contributors have been on the receiving end of nasty-grams from AC when their old articles were detected by their current plagiarism-detection software. When the bylines didn’t match, it became a non-starter for the publication of the material at AC. There have also been cases where the bylines matched perfectly, but AC’s over-protective software still flagged the article and the author still got the hassle-gram.

An article submitted to AC for payment consideration will obviously be subject to plagiarism scanning, but it is unclear if/how AC intends to implement this for other articles. Most of the articles that have created the accusations of plagiarism in the past were submitted under AC’s non-reviewed, bonus-only payment program. One wonders if AC will police its contributions on a regular basis regardless of review. Maybe a periodic scan of all recently published articles in the works. This writer welcomes such a policy. It only takes a few unethical people to make an entire community look like crooks.

On a related note, AC recently published new photo-use guidelines.  There has been no end to confusion of correct use of photos to compliment an article.  Many people just pull photos from anywhere on the web without regard to copyright.  AC took recent steps to limit and/or strip suspect and improperly cited photos from their site.  The new guidelines don’t address every source of free photos, but make it clear that just finding a picture on the web isn’t a valid reason for using it.

The Associated Content Two-Step

…or why this post had a question mark in the title.

Associated Content did a little back peddle today. The same “VP of Community Development” who posted the policy change about non-exclusive content no longer receiving up-front payment consideration, posted and update today which included “We will continue to evaluate content submissions for upfront payments on both an exclusive and non-exclusive basis.”

Current crisis avoided. However, hints were left in the explanation that a change is still waiting in the wings. The rush to change was blamed on ” …a serious legal issue.” I don’t have any facts or background on what this issue was, but I’m guessing it was probably complaints from other sites such as Mashable.com that triggered this.

Accusations of copyright infringement were made by some contributors to Mashable. AC founder Luke Betty responded, but the whining continued by the Mashable community ad nauseum despite AC’s assurance that better checks would be put into their system.

The real question is what changes does Associated Content have planned and how long will it take to implement them? The AC staff certainly got an eye full of forum posts on the subject. Many AC contributors had excellent alternatives to the heavy-hand “no soup for you” ruling that AC first announced. Time and tide…and stay tuned for more.

Associated Content Tip of the Day 6 Nov 2007: The WSJ’s Take on Web Trends

Jason Fry of The Wall Street Journal has an article out entitled “The Era of Bottom-Up Brands“.   It covers some of the history of what made Google what it is today and how the web is changing into user-driven content.  About halfway through, Associated Content is mentioned as an example of the “bottom-up” trend.

This provides a great example of what AC and similar sites are looking for in submissions.  Here’s an excerpt

But the company [AC] contends that many people performing a specific search will value specific information more than fancy wordplay: If you’re going to Venice in August with kids, Joe Friday’s workaday account of visiting Venice in August with kids may prove a lot more useful than a John Berendt travelogue.

I recommend the read for both novice and experienced web writer alike.

Click here to read The Era of Bottom-Up Brands in the WSJ.

Make More Money with Good Headlines.

Good headlines can be the key to more money when writing web content. It is also one of those things I take interest in and tinker with. I did my own headline analysis a while back. It’s playing out nicely. A joke article I wrote about vacations is racking up the hits mostly because of the title. People who are looking for cheap vacations are probably pissed when they see it, but the joke is on them. The next town hall meeting takes place on Wed., August 22nd, 2007 at 8 p.m. Eastern. The topic of the next town hall meeting is: Writing Headlines 101. On the web, headlines are often just as important as the body of your content. The best ones can grab the attention of readers, social book-marking sites and search engines alike. Log in to AC, join the Town Hall and learn how to write direct, unique headlines to maximize traffic to your AC content.

Associate Content Tip of the Day 28 April 2007: Adding/Deleting Photos

Adding photos to your article
Including a picture with with your article might not increase the original bid, but it does add visibility. Eyes are naturally drawn to pictures before words. Adding a relevant photo increases the chance that mice will click your article.

Sources: StockXchng and MorgueFile both have lots of free-use photos. They both have handy search features to help you find a topical picture quickly. Any site is a potential source if you read the terms and conditions and credit the photo properly. Government sites’ (.gov) photos are normally public domain.

Copyrights: Read the photo’s source site’s terms and conditions. If the photo requires permission be granted prior to use, you’d better get the permission or move on. Even when you do use free-use photos give the photographer credit. There is a spot in the publishing template for their name and URL where you found the photo.

Uploading: Page 5, the last page, of the Associated Content publishing template is where you can upload a picture. Once you locate a picture that you want to use.

1. Right click and choose “Save image…” in your browser. Some sites have a download feature, but the image may be too large for AC’s restrictions. Just use your right-click to save the smaller image.
2. Save the image (remember where you put it)
3. Click the upload button in the template
4. Browse to the save picture
5. Click OK
6. Fill out the copyright, credits and caption information
7. Click “Upload…”

You can upload up to five photos per article. When the article publishes, the pictures will display in order for every page turned. If your article has fewer pages than photos, your readers will have to use the navigation buttons under the photo area to view the extra photos.

Bugs: The Associate Content publishing template currently does not have a “delete photo” feature. Once you upload a picture, it’s permanently attached to your article. If you want to delete it you will need to delete the entire article and start anew.