I hear this question a lot. Usually about two weeks after someone starts a blog or twitter account.

"Am I Adding to the Conversation?"

It's a good question — and at the same time, a not-so-great question.

Really? What on earth do any of us think we can add to the conversation that will be mountain moving? After all, there's nothing new under the sun, hmm?

In some sense, no – none of us are able to add to the global conversation, per se. And what a freeing thought that should be to us.

And oh, the pressures of being eloquent, prize-winning prose-ologists . . . well, I get mental meditating on such massive machinations.

So now that we understand our words will hardly motivate nations or create cultural shifts or gaps in the ozone – now we can be free to just spill and see what transpires.

Write fast, publish bits and pieces, and by articulating what you're thinking — you'll get better.

All that said — yes. You are adding a great deal to the conversation. Because you're participating in it. If it's important to you, it will be important to someone else too. And there's always room for one more good one.

There's always room for one more good one.

Photo on Flickr by ohhector

This guest post is written by Lauren Carlson of Software Advice and points to an important topic and blog post about Copyright Protection

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So, when someone copies your work, you should be delighted, right? Not necessarily.

We at Software Advice have been active bloggers for quite some time, and as a result, have often had our content "borrowed" by other websites. Going along with the above adage, we weren't bothered too much, and thought it was nice that other sites wanted to use our content. However, with Google's latest algorithm change, the Panda update, things have changed up a bit.

The Panda update was meant to reduce the number of "spammy" websites, or content scrapers, that don't produce original content, but steal from other websites. This sounds like a positive update, but in some cases, Google screwed up. When the update went out, we saw a handful of spam sites disappear – good news. However, we also started to see cases in which spam sites were ranking higher than the original publishers of the content. Unfortunately, we experienced this firsthand.

The logical thing to do would be to force the scraper site to remove the stolen content. However, filing an unregistered copyright claim will do about as much damage as a toothless tiger. The only way to ensure that your content is protected is to register it with the U.S. Copyright office. So, that's what we did. Yes, all 1,200 pages of our website are now protected. Spammers beware! The process of copyrighting content is somewhat involved and can be slightly overwhelming for the first-timers out there. So, we decided to write about our experience, explain the process, and pass along any little tidbits of wisdom we picked up along the way.

To read the post, visit our blog here.

 —

Lauren Carlson writes about various topics related to CRM software, with particular interest in sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service. She has a background in the music industry, and when she isn't writing about software, you can find her running at Town Lake and singing at local venues. She is a graduate of the University of Texas with a bachelor's degree in journalism.