The recent situation with the Yahoo! list that had used excerpts from at least one of my books without permission or attribution has sparked a number of discussions about when it is and isn't okay to republish someone else's work without specific authorization. One person told me that he thought as long as he [...]
Good news: Yahoo! has taken the Clever Homemaker's list down. Applause to Yahoo! for demonstrating respect for intellectual property rights. I hope the list owner has learned a lesson.I am grateful to Charlene Davis for bringing this to my attention and being responsive to Yahoo!'s requests for additional information. I also appreciate the support of [...]
Yesterday I sent an e-mail to Yahoo!’s copyright/IP agent, identifying myself as one of the authors whose work was being used on the CleverHomemaker’s list without proper attribution or permission. The e-mail I received in response to my initial complaint told me I had to provide my full name, signature, address, phone number, and [...]
Last week, Charlene Davis (my friend, colleague, and occasional co-author) joined a Yahoo! Group called Clever Homemaker. The group has 6,000+ members and Charlene thought the articles the list owner was posting about business were very well-written. Then she recognized one of the articles — it was actually excerpt from one of my books on [...]
Some customers are loyal; others will leave you on a whim. What can you do to keep those customers who are buying from you because it’s convenient but would switch to a competitor for a slightly lower price or because you have service failure? Consider making it so hard for them to leave that [...]
This morning I called Go Daddy tech support and had to wait for a few minutes before someone was available to help me. When the phone system gave me my estimated wait time, it then offered me this option to press 1 if I didn’t want to listen to music while I was on hold. [...]
How many times have you received a voice mail message that rambled on, left out important information, or just didn’t make much sense? And on the other side of that, how many times have you place a call, reached someone’s voice mail, and left a message that you knew made you sound (let’s be gentle [...]
A substantial portion of my communication is done electronically through e-mail, texts, blogs, Twitter, websites, etc. It’s fast, convenient, efficient—but you know all that. Even so, since I was a small child, I have loved getting real mail: envelopes and packages delivered to me by the USPS. In the last year, the volume of [...]
One of the first questions I ask when beginning a new project is: Who is the reader? That's often the hardest question for the client to answer, but it’s essential if the product – whether it’s a book, an article, web copy, or whatever – is going to be effective. James Chartrand has put [...]
If your company hasn’t made a serious commitment to blogging, here’s a great reason why you should: Journalists are using blogs for research and story development. If you’re not blogging, you could be missing out on some valuable media exposure. How did I find this out? From a blog, of course.
