Mornin’ bellas! A quick note on two things before I jump into my posts of the day…
1. If you’ve tried to leave a comment on my site and discovered that it doesn’t show up right away, that’s probably because you’ve tried to embed a link or include some kind of website for me to check out in there. I get bombarded with spam for everything from online gambling to pharmaceuticals. I downloaded this amazing software that has caught 763 spam messages so far! But sometimes, your words get caught in there too. Fret not, I release all of the valid comments every day.
2. Thank you all for reading and loving my site! But I want to ask a favor. If you read a post of mine that you really like and you want to share it with a friend, please indicate where the post came from. Recently, I came across my Dutty Wine post cut and pasted verbatim on a guy’s MySpace blog, with no attribution indicating who wrote it. I got all kinds of mad and managed to contact him to ask him hey, can you please stop posting my words as if they’re yours? I mean, in that post I even say “I’m from Trinidad” and this guy was from Texas or something. He wrote back and explained to me that apparently, one of his friends cut and pasted my post and sent it around to all of his or her friends as an e mail. That made me kind of happy, that someone would want to share my writing with their friends, but I work damn hard on this site, and I think long and hard about what I say before I put it up. So please, just give me the respect I deserve and attribute Afrobella if you’re going to do that.
* If you’ll scroll down and look on the right, you will see that my site is protected by a Creative Commons license, as well as Copyscape.
I know, I know. I’m writing for a global audience and anything can go down on the Internets. But that doesn’t mean I can’t at least try to protect my neck. OK, love you guys. Back to your regularly scheduled Wednesday post.
Hey! Just wanted to say i love your site and it is on a list of my favorite blogs. You might want to think about putting a disclaimer of some sort on the site so people can know how you feel about copy and pasting your work without any reference to you.
Good looking out, Joli! I will post a disclaimer on the sidebar later on today. But your comment reminded me that I had the CC license on here and I should have mentioned that.
I totally hear ya. I wrote this really long post about things to consider before considering becoming an expat, and I found my post on another blog a few months later word for word with no changes. I was so annoyed by the whole thing as the woman didn’t even link back to my site. Goodness! Some people really have no ethics. In any event, keep up the good job. I haven’t really figured out the whole make-up thing, but your blog is definitely helping!
Girl I know what you mean! I found a posting of mine on another beauty site, headline and all!! I emailed them back to tell them I appreciated their post, but next time at least send them to my site and attribute. ATTRIBUTE!! Damn…
Anyways, have a great Turkey day and keep doing what you’re doing.
The copyright is yours, and you’re just asking people not to steal. Just because it’s easy to cut and paste doesn’t make it legal, or moral, for that matter!
I found photos of myself on someone else’s blog in a gallery of hairstyles, which she meant as a compliment, but it freaked me out. Let’s just say, I was a lot less polite that you are in asking people not to steal.
Yeah, I place a copyright mark on my blog. Plus, whenever I blog about a post from another blogger I go to great lengths to cite the person, hoping that if someone was to republish one of my posts they’d follow the example. Great site by the way.