Last Friday, January 20, marked the tenth anniversary of blogging for me. It all began on Live Journal and progressed to the on-line magazine you now read.

I began blogging after reading a number of others. Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, was and is the premier blogger for the material I enjoyed reading. But the writings of a Long Island mom with close ties to the New York City Fire Department struck a chord in my heart and provoked my brain. Michele Catalano was writing about the things I wanted to write about, and she was good. Really good.

The aftermath of the murders committed on September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed, turned me into a blogger. Michele, my “blogmother”, gave me the courage to write. Her pain and anger, and the terrible loss she felt, came through in her work and it pushed me to express myself.

Michele’s blogging has evolved. Her children have grown. Her written work these days is about the things she loves, music, sports and cars. Sites like A Small Victory and Command Post have come and gone, but they affected their times in many ways. Michele is a hero from an era where we badly needed heroes.

As my on-line writing is seen in more venues, this magazine, this blog, will be the core. I hope I can continue to be honest, trustworthy and, most of all, write about what I care about for a long time.

Here are a few articles I have recently published about blogging for businesses and for individuals.

• An introduction to blogs
  

  I wrote my first blog post on a stone tablet using a crude chisel many years ago. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But blogging, one of the biggest buzz words on the Internet, is just a few year old.

  Blog is short for “web log”. The first people to blog created a personal diary on the Internet. Today, about a decade later, nearly all the blogs in existence are still just a personal diary on the Internet.

• Company blogs and their value for public relations
  

  A company blog brings a great deal of value to a business’s public relations efforts.A company blog is about information. Blogging will allow a business to place important and necessary information in a place that is easily accessible and available 24/7. Companies blog about common product questions, upcoming product improvements, recent changes in the industry, employee promotions and awards and other information which may be of interest to the community of people that surrounds the business.

• The best reasons to continue writing on your blog
  

  One of the most quoted phrases on blogs applies to writing on your blog; “Life happens.” Anyone who writes reaches a point when it becomes difficult to continue. It might be the dreaded “writer’s block.” It could be the writer’s changing interests.

  Everyone who writes a blog does so for a complex set of reasons. Life happens, things change, yet the blog remains. What are the best reasons for continuing to write on your blog?

Kudos to Stacy and the Hosting Matters folks. While trying to improve the site last evening, I managed to erase it. It has been restored.

I am using a plugin to redirect – 301 – old, messy URL’s to the new version.

Well, they started with Drudge [my bad, it's a parody site called Drudge Retort]. It seems that they object to his brief, 50-100 word, teases quoted from their stories.

And they say:

All requests for republication of AP material must be in writing, clearly stating the purpose and manner in which the material will be used. All republished material must carry AP credit. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all permission is given for one-time use only. No political candidate, political party, political action committee, polemical organization, or any group formed for partisan purpose may use AP copy in any publication. There may be a fee for reprint use.

There is something in copyright law called “fair use”.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

In practice, quoting a small portion of a news story, with a link to the full story is the common and generally accepted blogging practice.

AP has a problem. Various media sources have advanced claims that AP routinely publishes as its own work material that it has taken from existing, copyrighted sources within the media.

The blogger called Patterico, an assistant DA in Los Angeles, has found that they used content from his blog, clearly copyright protected and the product of his own reporting efforts. In his post, he reports on several bloggers who are billing AP for copyrighted material they believe AP stole from them.

I just dropped some money on a “pro” theme, I know that there are some glitches, so please contact me if things are crazy bad.

I have to integrate advertising, and donation abilities. And, I think I have a clew about how I was supposed to implement the design.

Lots of plug-in updates showing. I guess I should figure out why the automatic upgrade thingy does not work.

Lots to do but it seems stable for the nonce.