The Article Writer

All the hype and hoopla over Technorati has brought a painful result to me since registering with the site earlier this month: tons of spammy messages to two of my three WordPress blogs. Not coincidentally, the two spam attacked blogs are the ones I could claim via Technorati. The third one,which I could not claim for some reason, has been immune to the stupid pharmaceutical adverts. Yes, I know how to limit spam through Akismet, when it works, but I believe Technorati is driving spammers to my blogs.

Long story, shortened: I deleted my Technorati information yesterday. End of spam. End of story.

Rumors of my placing the Aviation Employment Board on the open market are absolutely true. Just one week ago I posted information about the site on the Associate Programs forum. Thus far I have seen some interest.

As the listing mentions, the site does require regular work as it is an aviation job board with nearly 4000 members, people who stop by on a regular basis to view job listings. So, if you are looking for a site with minimal upkeep the AEB is not for you.

Why am I selling? To pursue my passion! Yes, writing is what I do best and web design/community management is something I want to do less of. I also manage another site, the Corporate Flight Attendant Community, but it isn’t for sale. Between the two sites, they do take up time that I would prefer to direct toward writing.

I am not sure if the AEB will sell right now. If it doesn’t, I’ll make some changes to the site and then try again down the road.

The Washington Post recently fired one of its bloggers after it was learned that he had plagiarized some of his earlier writings. Some are suggesting that the blogger, Ben Domenech, may have been singled out because he was a conservative with strong anti-liberal views, ideas that probably don’t sit well with the majority of the newspaper’s readership. Nevertheless Mr. Domenech did plagiarize and subsequently lost his position with the newspaper after only three days of work.

As I was surfing the ‘net to find details about the story, I discovered information about a site called Turnitin, which helps to uncover plagiarism in the writings of college and university students through a program that matches students’ works against previously written submissions that have been stored in various databases.

According to an article referencing Turnitin [nice attribution on my part, right?] companies are using this service too.

Now, if we could get each of the article directories to adopt this same practice…