Monday, February 23, 2009

Feel free to copy...

A guy sent me a message asking if it would be okay to post one of my stories on his blog. I answered "yes, of course" - but then realized that I should be clearer about it here as well:

If anyone wants to use parts of or whole stories from this blog somewhere else, feel free to do so. The only thing I ask is that I'm mentioned and that there is a link back to the story in my blog. (And if you send me an email or write a comment about it as well, I'll even know about it.)

In this age of quickly emerging technologies and swift deletions, the only sure way of survival is to be copied...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jo, the standard way of 'sharing' is not letting people copy but to use RSS. Well, I can't really say - not let- there is little that we can do to prevent. But you can allow or encourage then to use your work properly and appropriately through RSS (really simple syndication).
Although copying is possible, and I would agree, you (and I ) would want to be given credit for our original work, and get link backs to our own sites.

But RSS does that for you automatically - since it is NOT copying but simply 'streaming' your story/post or set of posts to a spot on another web page.

I should point out that some sites do not have RSS feeds; also commercial business (and individuals) strictly forbid copy and reproducing their 'work' in any form anywhere else.

Look it up in Wikipedia if you need more information. The RSS feed from any Blogger (Google) blog is: the complete URL/atom.xml

This creates a copy - though the 'stream's format' varies in how much is actually shown. It can be just a title or a summary or the complete post/article along with photos or video in some cases.

You can also add RSS feeds to your own blog or profile on various social networks for showing info of yours or others' blog/sites. It's quite powerful a tool - almost hidden from view - but the results can be very formidable or totally invisible. Twitter works, for example, by using something akin to an short RSS feed. By the way, I always enjoy your Twitter updates and wish you and James would Twitter more often. Many of my Twitter updates are automatic now, which is why they come so often.