The good people over at blogged.com ranked me at an 8.2 out of 10. I never even heard of blogged.com until I got an email from one of their editors yesterday stating:

“We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of
Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.
After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.”

Looking over the site it looks like it has a nice directory of blogs in there, as each one is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their quality and are hand-picked by the editors. Users have the ability to rank your blog too but according to the FAQ’s it doesn’t significantly affect your rating because the editors rate all of the blogs. Either way, I feel like I’m back in high school again trying to run a popularity contest. So ummm…vote for me.

Have you ever read an article somewhere and realized that it looks too familiar?  That’s because you probably wrote it a year or so ago, or read it on someone else’s blog.  “Splogs” are usually fake (and some legitimate sites) blogs that harvest your blog’s content via script, then mirror it on their own sites in order to boost pagerank and ad revenue.

Honestly I was unfamiliar with this term until a few months ago when I started getting emails about my posts ending up in various places on the Internet.  Some people were accusing me of stealing, others were just looking out for a fellow blogger and letting me know that my boobs weren’t the only thing going around the web.  I think the act of someone’s website being duplicated around the Internet is like web herpes — it spreads around and you can find it all you want, but there’s no stopping it.

When it comes time that you find one of your posts lingering on an unfamiliar website, don’t just ignore it!  My first brush with splogging was back in April when a ton of my tutorials ended up on some web development site — no credentials, links, or anything.  When I tried to contact the author I pleasantly found out that the blog contained no contact information or even so much as a contact form or ‘about’ page.  So, I did a whois to find out who the guy was and he obviously denied stealing the content stating that he runs a feed site that wasn’t crediting articles properly.  A load of bullshit, but it brought up a good point.

So what can you do?

If you notice that some lowlife is stealing your posts, the first thing you should do is call them out on it.  I’ve gotten more in the habit of leaving comments on the blogs with a link back to my article, and by the time the site owner is able to remove it, the credibility of their site is already ruined.  If you’re not the blatant confrontational type and the idea of content stealing doesn’t horribly disgust you, try contacting the splogger privately. While most blogs will have some kind of contact page or obvious way to get ahold of whoever owns the site, splogs usually do not.  This is because splogs are usually not maintained by actual people, but rather scripts that spider around the internet and collect content.  If that is the case, you can try to contact them in other ways, or get the site shut down:

• If the blog is hosted with a blog service like Blogger or Wordpress.com, you can flag or report the blog as spam or questionable.  Most services will immediately remove splogs
• You can do a whois on the domain name, which may contain the splog’s owner and contact information.   Since most registrars provide domain privacy and domain owners can easily fake information, the information you get may not be reliable.
• Find out who hosts the site, and email their abuse or legal department.  You can find out who hosts almost any site by going to whoishostingthis.com .
• If all else fails, run a whois on the IP address of the site, which will usually give you the collocation provider who owns the IP space so you can complain to them

Most all hosting providers (usually hosts in the U.S.)  have strict policies against copyrights and plagiarism, so don’t be worried that your complaint will not be taken seriously.  Since splogs are also considered as spam, most hosts will be happy to get rid of them as they are just a waste of space and bandwidth.

Those of you who read Corgie’s post on the front page of Digg the other day, the answer is no — I’m not selling ad space (or sponsored reviews) on my site at this time, and obviously not for $560 a month. I might in the future when I get more traffic but when that time comes the announcement will be made by me, not some idiot who eats roaches for a living. In case you’re wondering why:

1. At the time of this writing, my monthly traffic totals about 756,000 hits per month and 20,000 per day (give or take a few thousand), only a fraction of which are unique, reflected by the stats counter on the right-hand side of my site. Corgie claimed that I get millions of hits of day, making it look like $560 is a fair price to pay. The reality is, most of the sites that I link to already only get 30-100 hits per month from my site, which is probably only worth $2 per month.
2. My site is a personal site mainly focused around programming and the worthless stuff I choose to write about sometimes. I’m not going to fill my website with ads for shit that have nothing to do with the content of my blog.

I’m not against selling ad space, in fact, I’ve already been planning to start doing so in the near future as long as my traffic continues to increase at the same rate it has been for the last 6 months. However, the advertising will only be available for progammers and other site owners who are offering technology-based services.

I got this idea from a comment I wrote about Aaron Brazell in my last post that he responded to, and I figured I it wouldn’t hurt to turn my own blog into a meat market. I know they’re tempting to look at, but who said that hot guys can’t write blogs?

Top 8 sexilicious bloggers (in no particular order), as well as their locations so you can stalk them:

Justin Durban from justindurban.com – Burbank, CA

Shelby DeNike from fauxzen.com – Los Angelos, CA

Ronald from 0×000000.com – Somewhere in the Netherlands, but usually in my bedroom

Aaron Brazell from technosailor.com – Baltimore, MD

Chris Shiflett from shiflett.org – Brooklyn, NY

Christian Mohn from h0bbel.p0ggel.org – Bergen, Norway

Michale Sica from michaelsica.com – Orlando, FL

Luke Welling from lukewelling.com – Washington, D.C.

If you’re a sexy blogger and you’re wondering why you’re not on this list, it’s probably because 1) I’ve never seen your site, 2) you don’t have a picture up, or 3) you’re not attractive. Of course you can always email me, since I’ll probably need some convincing.
Update: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks the OmniTI guys are hot as hell…

So it’s Friday and I decided to start a new tradition of letting everyone know how much spare time I have on my hands nowadays. Here are the sexy sites of the week:

.::0×000000.com::.

If I was ever going to pose nude on a website, this would be the one. Well, aside from all the other ones. So yea, if you want to see some true hacking action, mozy on over to this guy’s site and take some lessons from the master. At least that’s what I called him last night.

Just kidding…(please don’t sue me)

.::ejabs.com::.

I think the whole two brain cells I have left get smarter every time I go to Matt’s site. I don’t quite know how to categorize his site…it’s like the jellybean jar of blogs. He’s actually hosted on one of our servers too, which means that there’s a 78.4% chance that his blog is having sex with mine behind our backs.

.::ilovejackdaniels.com::.

Like most Italians, I hate Jack Daniels. But if they made a liquor called ‘Dave Child’ I’d be all swigging the whole bottle. Ok, that sounded a little less dirty in my head. While you’re there, check out Dave’s other blog, geek-fitness.com. No, I’m not calling you fat.

.::thesneeze.com::.

To be honest, I’m not a big fanatic about his actual blog part, but the real gold is in the Steve, Don’t Eat It! section, where Steve randomly decides to just put things in his mouth that really don’t belong there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he learned it from her.

It’s been almost a year since I stumbled upon this article that outlines the top 10 URL flops on the internet.  If you haven’t been there, check it out dammit.

I received a note from a friend that on April 30th, participating blogs are supposed to do a blank post with nothing but a single graphic, as a way of honoring the people who were shot at VA tech earlier. I’m not usually one to bathe in tragedy after it happens, but since I have a lot of friends and former colleagues from ECPI that go there, I doesn’t seem to be a bad idea.

http://www.onedayblogsilence.com/OneDayBlogSilence.com.html