Month: April 2011

Content Scraping or Aggregation?

First, some definitions, in my own words:

Content Scraping

A largely illegal and often insidious attempt to rob, harvest or duplicate information from another website without permission in an attempt to avoid the effort involved in creating great manual content and generate income, usually ad based.

Scraped sites would not typically acknowledge the originator or location of the scraped content.

Content Aggregation

A gathering and organising of various sources of relevant information from different websites into a central area, usually via importation of RSS feeds. Such sites are considered helpful to visitors in that they contain all the information required in one place without the need to trawl the net. Aggregation sites tend not to be ad or commercial heavy.

Aggregated sites should acknowledge the author and location of the content they import.

Google has recently said that it will downgrade ‘content farm’ type websites where most of the content is not original and is automated in some way. I worry that they may not make a distinction between the above two types.

Leon

How I’d Like to Be Paid Please!

Just a simple public wish and hint about how I and presumably most people would like to be paid by their customers/clients. I will not take the ‘recession’ as an excuse for problems paying. If you don’t have money don’t hire me:

On Time Please

You may not realise that I, the company whose services you hire consists of real people (me) with real bills (many) that need to be paid. If you agree to hire me for the price I quote then I expect to be paid when I do what you asked. I put my valuable time and private/family life aside to work for you so I expect to receive the agreed fee when I ask for it. I will deeply resent being made to chase money owed as it will take up even more of my afore mentioned valuable time.

Pay Digitally

It’s 2011 and the ability to pay someone without having to move has been around for quite a while. Cheques are an antiquated method of payment. Why would you go to the trouble and expense of writing one, putting in an envelope, buying  a stamp and traveling to your nearest post office when you could transfer a payment through online banking or Paypal instantly? You’re also asking me to leave the office and go lodge the cheque when received. For me that’s currently a 10 mile round trip taking at least 30/45 more minutes out of my working day.

Respond to Invoices

I send invoices digitally and very rarely get any response or confirmation of receipt. I consider it good manners to acknowledge an invoice and notify the sender of when they are likely to receive payment. Not acknowledging invoices makes sender nervous.

Alert on Payment

If you do pay by bank transfer, congratulations, I salute you but be aware that most people wont get notified by their bank that a new payment has come in and if I forget to check manually then I’m likely to presume you still havn’t paid. Also, make sure your payment is labelled as coming from you as it’s not always obvious who made the payment. Similarly, if you send a cheque, say you’ve sent it. Things get lost in the post.

Finally,  make sure a cheque wont bounce before you send it and if you are in doubt then make an instant/digital or cash payment to make sure. Bounced cheques cause havoc in people’s accounts and invite large bank fees to process.

Leon