ABC Article Directory Blog

Copyright © 2009 Chip Cooper

Does your website incorporate a blog, forum, or listserv — where users may post text or files? If so, are you liable if your users post defamatory materials about someone else?

In 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (Section 230) came to the rescue of “interactive computer services” by overruling prior case law that would hold websites liable. But Section 230 is not bullet-proof. Interactive websites may still be liable as the May, 2009, Ninth Circuit case of Barnes v. Yahoo, Inc. illustrates.

Sex And Lies

The case of Barnes v. Yahoo involved salacious facts centering on the aftermath of a break-up between plaintiff Cecilia Barnes and her boyfriend.

After the break-up, Barnes’ ex-boyfriend created fictitious profiles for her on a website operated by Yahoo. Included were nude photos, plus offers for sex. To make matters worse, he also provided her email address, physical address, and work phone number. All this resulted in Barnes receiving emails and calls with the expectation of a sexual liaison.

The Dumb Mistake

After Barnes’ four separate emails to Yahoo demanding the removal of the objectionable materials did not result in their removal, Barnes received a call from an executive at Yahoo. Barnes alleged that the executive promised to “take care of it”. Barnes further alleged that she relied on this promise and took no further action to remove the objectionable materials.

You guessed it — Yahoo failed to remove the objectionable materials, and after two months, Barnes filed a lawsuit against Yahoo. Continue reading »

Getting a flood of advertisers is a dream of any owner of a publisher website. But creating a flood of advertisers is not a breeze. Many people have a misconception that if the publisher site has good amount of organic traffic, advertisers will swarm towards them and bid for the keywords. The true fact is that the advertisers will not even notice you if you are not within their reach. This is where the search engine traffic monetizing service providers come into play. This is like a platform for the advertisers and publishers, where the best will be meeting the best. Targeted traffic is what the advertisers will be looking for and targeted advertisers will be what the publishers will be there for. Hence these platforms are the best ones for the publishers hunting for the advertisers.

Getting The Maximum Advertising Revenue

There are countless numbers of search engine traffic monetizing services available out there. You will be well aware that they will be claiming some percentage of your advertising revenue that comes through them. The percentage of deduction depends on the service provider. Some of the very best search engine traffic monetizing service providers like Query Ads will provide the maximum advertising revenue to you. They deduct only 20% of the advertising revenue flowing to your website through them. They actually deserve more than 20% because you will get the best targeted advertisements listed in your website. The best search engine traffic monetizing service providers will manually check and ensure that the ads are targeted before they supply them to you. So you should compare several service providers and make sure that you get the maximum advertising revenue without any compromise to the quality of ads. Continue reading »

Change is a part and parcel of the universe and the same is true about the cyber world. “Bing”, new search engine created by Microsoft, promises to bring that change by becoming your “decision engine”. Though this search engine is available to every net user from 1st June, but according to the company sources it will take another two days to make it completely available to the general public. With this new introduction the company hopes to outperform the search engine leader Google.

With this new search engine the company has replaced Live Search. Microsoft would aim to match the “perceived satisfaction” of search engine with the real experience by helping the user get exactly what he was looking.

Rather than working like any other search engine bing promises to be different. The major difference would be in approach. Bing would list all the relevant results and reviews taken for various sites in the same page along with related results in the left hand column. The categorization is done based on various features of the product or the subject that you are searching about. Continue reading »

Over the past few years, social media sites have revolutionized the way humans connect with each other. It has changed the way people seek & share information, or research products/goods/services.

Growing at a pace of more than 3 million new members a day and enjoying total membership of around 200 million, today social media sites has become a wonderful and apparently inevitable force. It has evolved in functionality and grown enough in reputation to make social network marketing as a feasible online marketing tool. In past it was used to optimize a website, but now it evolves more into the corporate branding.

It has even turned out to be the new “word of mouth” mantra in business world and helped many business personnel in promoting products and services online. These days every leading and mid-sized company is considering social media sites as new business marketing tool that can help in corporate branding. Moreover, many business personnel believe that it has the power to make a company’s products and services go viral if businesses are able to grasp the effectiveness of establishing a brand and its online reputation. Continue reading »

In Iran, Twitter is being used to allow demonstrators, freedom fighters and just about everyone else in Iran to get the real story out to the world wide community. Twitter obliged the U.S. by halting a planned server upgrade to make sure that there was no interruption of service.

Now, if that doesn’t prove the importance of Twitter nothing will. It’s not just a gimmick but rather an incredible tool that just hasn’t reached it’s potential. You can now participate in the growth of this rapidly growing tool both personally and for you online or ‘brick and mortar’ business.

In this brief article I want to give you hold-outs five (5) reasons to start Twittering now…..

Reason #1: If it’s good enough for John McCain it should be fine for you. Now, I am not really an advocate of John McCain. You have to think that if Twitter has been able to get to individuals who haven[t used a computer ever, there has got to be something there. Continue reading »

Author William Safire, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has contributed to “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine and written a number of books, including books on writing. If you search the Internet, looking for quotes about writing, you will find different versions of his Great Rules of Writing. Here is a short version:

“Do not put statements in the negative form.

And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.

If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.

If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.”

Safire has joyfully broken each rule as he has written them down. In this article, I will examine each of these rules:

1. Do not put statements in the negative form.

Always write positive statements. The positive is stronger than the negative.

Still this is a rule I sometimes break. Even though the positive is stronger than the negative, the negative sometimes just feels more natural.

2. And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.

Do not start sentences with a conjunction. Conjunctions serve to connect words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, not to start them.

Still this is a rule I sometimes break. And when I do, I find the sentences look fine. And is sometimes the best option for continuing the flow of an idea.

3. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

Reread and edit your work to avoid repetition. Enough said.

This is a rule I never break except when I am really tired.

4. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

Never use a long word when a small one will do. Using a thesaurus and carefully selecting new vocabulary words can help improve your writing. In some sentences, however, simple is best.

Still this is a rule I sometimes break. Words are small empires and each has a boundary around it. Words want to expand their boundaries. They want to become all things to all people. Sometimes the bigger words are simply better. Continue reading »

Do you need backup software or do you need an online backup service?

Are you concerned about the safekeeping of your photos, e-mails, address book, Favorites, etc. that you have on your computer? Yes? Well, that’s a good thing because sooner or later your hard drive will fail or get so corrupted you will have to format it…losing everything.

Hi! Al Stewart here. I was a computer technician for 30 years and I have seen thousands of hard drives fail. They fail on laptop computers and million dollar main frame computers too. The life expectancy of consumer hard drives is approximately 4 years.

There is nothing you can do to prevent hard drive failure, but there is a lot you can do to prevent the loss of your valuable files, but you must do it before your drive fails. And now, to the subject of this article: The various ways to automatically make backup copies of your data.

When you get right down to it, a “backup” is made any time you copy something to a new location. If you download a photo from the Internet and then save it to a CD you have made a backup because you now have two copies, each on different media. One is on your hard drive and one is on the CD. This is an example of a manual backup. Continue reading »

A resource box is basically an author bio that accompanies your article. Whenever your article is republished, that resource box will also be republished.

The resource box is extremely important because it contains a link to your website (this is how submitting articles builds links), and it’s your chance to try to lure the reader back to your website. It also helps you gain the confidence of your reader by sharing some info about yourself that shows them why they should take your article/advice/teaching seriously.

When you’re writing resource boxes, it helps to have a little formula to follow:

1. You can just launch into your bio–there is no need to start out by saying “About The Author” or anything like that.

2. Include your name and a brief bio that would let the reader know why you are qualified to provide them information on your topic.

3. Write in full sentences–don’t just put your keywords or a website link. Continue reading »

Back in the early days of Internet search you could rank high for any given term by simply repeating it throughout your content. And that what SEO basically was at the time: stuffing your pages with keywords. The search engines of today are much more sophisticated, there are a lot more factors in the game and SEO is more about off-site activities. No matter how you look at it link authority (the quantity and quality of incoming links to a site) is the single most powerful rank determining factor. Strong linking profiles can make up for any lack of onpage optimization and bring a website to the top of search results.

It’s obvious that you need to build links to achieve and maintain high search engine rankings. The question is what kind of links do you need? Sure, ‘relevant and quality’ ones. This standard SEO reply goes on like a broken record all over the web. Knowing that no two links are equal let’s see what factors determine the link value.
Continue reading »

Among SEO professionals, there isn’t always consensus on precisely which and to what degree site factors contribute or detract from rankings on Google because the factors actually vary by industry. There are indeed, a number of contentious issues: markup and content quality, use of title tags, site organization and even arguments that Google Analytics data factors in to site rankings. Not likely (yet), but certainly up for debate among SEO professionals.

However, there are some Google ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on Google SERPs. However, these are opinions, find out for yourself how these apply to projects you’re working on.

Recommended Steps to Improve Google Ranking

1. Use keywords in HTML title tags. Probably the most significant factor for a site regardless of the competitive landscape, the title tag must be consistent with content in the page for best results. The more keywords in your title, the less effective this factor, be judicious. Continue reading »