By Kenneth Barbalace

For many Digg.com users, the removal of Digg's shout feature also meant they lost the ability to share articles and communicate privately with their Digg friends. While not an ideal solution, one work around to the loss of the Digg shout feature is to use Twitter.

Create a Twitter profile

To effectively use Twitter, however, you first need to create a Twitter account that uses the same user name as your Digg account and uses the same icon on both Digg and Twitter. This will help friends/followers keep track of who is who on both sites. You should also reference your Digg account on their Twitter profile and link to your Twitter account on their Digg profile. This will help friends/followers know that both accounts really are really the same person. Linking to your Twitter account from Digg will also help new Digg friends quickly find your Twitter profile. If you already have a Twitter account that has a different username from your Digg account, at least use the same icon for both accounts and cross reference them.

Tweeting effectively in 140 characters

One challenge with Twitter is that it only allows for 140 characters per "tweet"; as such, long web addresses can pose a challenge. The most common work around to this problem is to use a website that will create very short web address aliases. The site I tend to use is http://bit.ly/ because its aliased web addresses tend to be less than 20 characters in length. When tweeting an article try to use a short concise description followed by a shortened link to the original article then the comment "on #Digg" and a shortened link to the Digg thread so that Digg friends can easily Digg and comment on the article. For Example:

Effectively sharing articles with Digg friends via Twitter http://bit.ly/21aA6 on #Digg http://bit.ly/Sp06i

Don't use the Digg bar!

I know that Digg has their own link shortening feature that frames articles in a "Digg bar" but don't use it. Framing sites the way the Digg bar does is considered bad netiquette (bad Internet etiquette). The idea of framing other people's sites with one's own stuff was first introduced in the 1990s, and was fought against back then as bad netiquette when it was first introduced. Much of the revolt against framing stemmed from the fact that search engines, etc. that were framing other sites were also trying to slip ads into their frames and the frames were confusing users into thinking there was an association between the two sites. Others problem with frames is that they can trap the user in the frame and users can not see the actual web address of the website being visited. This means that when they go to share the article they are reading, they actually end up linking to the site doing the framing and not the site that contains the actual article. Also keep in mind that Digg does provide an option for users to turn off the Digg bar via one's profile settings so if you send tweets with Digg bar links your friends with the Digg bar disabled will be unable to Digg your articles. To combat framing, many sites actually implemented measures to break out of such frames (like our main site does).

Yes having to create two links in Tweets is inconvenient compared to the Digg bar, but if you want your followers to actually Digg your articles, you need to make your tweets as user friendly to ALL of your followers as possible. This is also nicer for your Twitter followers who might not be Digg users.

Digg should be absolutely ashamed of itself for framing sites with their Digg bar, it is very poor netiquette. I'd strongly encourage folks to turn off the Digg bar via their Digg profile.

Why the # marks?

Oftentimes tweets will contain words with # marks in front of them (e.g. #eco, #Digg, etc.). These are for yet another social networking site called Twibes, which allows folks to subscribe to specific interest groups that aggregate tweets based on subject matter. For instance, #eco is for the Twibe group "Green" (http://www.twibes.com/group/GREEN).

Summary

Digg shouts are dead to this dismay of many, but it is possible to still effectively share articles with your Digg friends if you can get them to also join Twitter and you are effective with the way you tweet. Just remember to use clear concise descriptions; provide links to both the original article as well as the Digg thread; and don't rely on the Digg bar.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Twelve years ago today, on October 22, 1995, I started what would eventually become EnvironmentalChemistry.com. I remember the day quite well. I was attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a non-traditional student and after relentless badgering from one of my friends, I had been finally goaded into creating a website. This was before the heady days of the dot com bubble. It was also the days before Internet Explorer had come onto the scene when Netscape Navigator ruled the web. I had no idea what I wanted to do with a website, but I knew my friend Del would not let the issue rest until I started my website.

In the beginning my website was hosted on a NeXT server run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Mathematics Department. I wasn't a math major, but anyone on campus who had a clue knew the math department's NeXT computer lab the coolest computer lab on campus next to the Cray Supercomputers, and undergrads like me had a snowballs chance in hell of getting access to the supercomputer labs.

My original strategy was simply to throw stuff on my website to see what would stick. I was majoring in geology and fire science (with a specialization in hazardous materials), so it only made sense for me to add things related to those subjects on my site. Eventually, I had my first computer built for me (a Pentium 90), which I quickly upgraded to Windows NT4.0. The next year UAF started installing Ethernet connections in our dorm rooms, and with this I got the bright idea of hosting my website on my own computer running Apache.

As I was nearing the end of my college years, I moved my website off of the university network and onto a commercial web hosting provider under its own domain name (the less than creative KLBProductions.com). Over time, geology lost out on my site to the chemistry and hazardous materials and I began to take a stronger interest in environmental issues. In 1999 as the focus of this site revolved around environmental, chemistry and hazardous materials related topics, I had a spark of "brilliance" and registered the domain EnvironmentalChemistry.com. Over the subsequent couple of years I worked on rebranding my site from its quirky but non-descriptive title "YOGI'S Behemoth" (Yogi was my nickname at the time) to the much more descriptive and marketable EnvironmentalChemistry.com.

In the twelve years that have past since I was goaded into creating a website, a great deal has changed on the Internet. Netscape's iron clad domination of the Internet was broken by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In time Internet Explorer rose to dominate the Internet with an iron clad fist only to see its death grip broken by a descendent of Netscape called Firefox. The dot com bubble grew and somehow missed me. Eventually, the dot com bubble exploded and left its shattered remnants scattered across the Internet. AltaVista and Yahoo came to dominate Internet search and directories only to be crushed by a new upstart called Google. Static webpages that had to be individually coded gave way to dynamic pages driven by databases and content management systems. Graphical banner ads and affiliate programs rose to dominate the business models of small web publishers like myself in the late 1990s, only to become second string filler to content targeted text ads provided by Google and others.

Over twelve years of evolution and revolution on the Internet, I have methodically nurtured this site, from a college hobby into a serious resource that is highly respected. All along I have strived to produce new articles and resources that I hoped people would find useful, informative and of superior quality. I have been slow to jump on the latest Internet fads preferring instead to take a long term approach to running this site. It is extremely unlikely that EnvironmentalChemistry.com will make me really wealthy in a financial sense. It has, however, evolved into a full time endeavor and I am able recruit scientists and professionals to write the high quality articles readers have come to expect.

Without the help of others, I could not have made this site the success it is today. As such, I would like to thank those who have leant their expertise to EnvironmentalChemistry.com. First, I want to thank my mother Roberta Barbalace, who has leant her many years of experience as an environmental professional and chemistry professor. Roberta has written many of the articles I have published, and serves as my technical editor evaluating articles submitted by freelance writers. My wife Julia also has my sincerest gratitude for all her efforts including copy editing articles before they are published. I would also like to thank all of the freelance writers who have written articles for EnvironmentalChemsitry.com. Finally, I would like to thank all of the readers who have linked to articles and resources on EnvironmentalChemistry.com and/or shared my site with their family, friends, classmates, teachers, and colleagues.

What does the next twelve years have in store for EnvironmentalChemistry.com? Only time will tell, but I hope to continue to raise the quality of the articles we publish as well as increase the frequency we publish new articles. With lots of hard work and the support of readers like you, I believe the next twelve years will be very bright.

By Kenneth Barbalace

One of the things that always amazes me is how poorly non-profit environmental organizations understand Fair Use clauses of the copyright law and how frequently individuals (even leaders) of these organizations plagiarize from others when writing their own articles. In our case, articles we publish on EnvironmentalChemistry.com have been frequent victims of copyright infringement and/or plagiarism by different well know environmental organizations.

We are flattered that these environmental organizations want their membership to read what we write. Unfortunately, the republishing and/or plagiarizing of our works really does cause us long term financial harm. This, in turn, hurts our ability to pay fair rates to highly qualified professionals, scientists and academics who write the very articles for us that these organizations find so valuable to their causes.

Like traditional media outlets, we depend upon advertising revenue to provide the funding we need to pay writers to research and write the articles we publish. We do not have some wealthy benefactor nor government agency underwriting our efforts. We fund the writing of new articles with the ad revenue existing articles generate. In turn, the new articles will eventually help to fund yet more articles. The more ad revenue we can generate, the more really good articles we can have written and publish.

When an individual or environmental organization plagiarizes or republishes our articles on their own websites, they cause us harm in three ways. First, if they republish our article on their website, instead of simply linking to the article on our website, they provide readers access to our content without us having an opportunity to display the very advertising that enables us to publish these articles in the first place.

The second way we are harmed is that when someone republishes or plagiarizes our articles on their own websites, they create a competing copy of our works for search engines to index. These competing copies of our articles can cause a duplicate content penalty to be assigned our original article. This can result in our article being buried in search results, thereby limiting the number of readers who find our article, and thus limiting our ability to recoup our initial investment. Alternatively, the duplicate copy of our article showing up in search results can also siphon off readers we might otherwise attract to our original article. Again, this limits our ability to recoup our initial investment via the advertising we display on our pages.

The third way plagiarism and the republishing of our articles harm us is that we really depend on people discovering and then sharing our website with their friends. If someone republishes our articles on their own site instead of simply linking to the original article with a short description, we lose the opportunity to introduce new readers to the other articles and resources our site has to offer. This, in turn, costs us an opportunity for the word of mouth promotion that we depend on so dearly to help increase readership.

Plagiarism is Academic and Intellectual Fraud

Any teacher will confirm that there have always been lazy students who liberally "copy and paste" writing by others into their own reports. The Internet, however, has made this seductively easy and more people in all walks of life are crossing the line from being influenced by the writing of others to actively copying and pasting other's writings and claiming them as their own. This is plagiarism, as well as academic and intellectual fraud.

When one references the writings of someone else one MUST NOT simply copy and paste select sentences or paragraphs from the other writings and include them in their own writings. Instead, one needs to read and absorb the message of the writings and then distill the message in one's own words. Even changing the order of words in sentences or replacing a few select words now and then is not sufficient to avoid plagiarizing the works of others – the words must be original. If one does decide that a section of text from the original writings needs to be incorporated into one's own works then proper citations (including full webpage address for online writings) needs to be clearly provided to ensure proper credit is given to the original source of the copied writings.

The line between being influenced by and plagiarizing the works of others can be a very fine line, which is why it is always important to properly cite referenced used when writing. It is also why I run every article submitted to me for publication through tools that are designed to detect plagiarism.

The latest case of our content being plagiarized is an editorial on the website of a well known environmental organization. From what I can tell, the writer is the president of the organization. In the editorial, a very considerable section of our article "Mercury in Fish vs. Omega-3 Fatty Acids Health Benefits", was copied and pasted into the editorial without any citation to our original article being provided. In all, the plagiarized section of the editorial is 80% identical to the text in our original article (around 650 of around 800 words). The only changes made to the plagiarized content were the occasional addition or deletion of a couple of words here or there to make it appear original. By taking the text from our article and claiming he wrote it and that the thoughts and words are his and his alone (by way of a lack of proper citation), the president of this organization has committed plagiarism and intellectual fraud.

When it comes to intellectual integrity and the sharing of important messages, the ends never justify the means. Those who plagiarize and/or commit intellectual fraud to further their cause should be rebuked because in the end, their fraud will be exposed and it will do more harm to their cause than good.

Right now I will allow the individual and organization to remain anonymous. If, however, my emails to the organization and individual in question are ignored, and the issue of plagiarism is not addressed to my satisfaction, I will publish in painful detail the extent of the plagiarism and make sure that this incident of intellectual fraud is fully exposed to the light of day.

The Fair Use Misunderstanding

Frequently environmental organizations will use the Fair Use clause of copyright law to defend their republishing articles on their websites. The problem is they have a complete misunderstanding of what protections the Fair Use clause affords and they are claiming fair use rights they do not have. Title 17 of the United States Code, Section 107 states:

Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Simply being non-profit and having a noble cause does not grant one Fair Use status. One must meet all four criteria for Fair Use. Republishing articles on one's website that are already published on anther website violates requirements number 3 and 4. Number four is violated because a competitive copy of protected works is being created, which competes against the original in search engines and draws readers away from the original, thus denying the author the ability to earn compensation for their efforts. In addition, copying and republishing an article instead of linking to the original article would be more than is necessary to serve the purpose of commenting on, criticizing or informing readers of said article.

A very good example of how courts interpret the requirements for Fair Use protection is the case Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5669 (C.D. Cal. 2000). Chilling Effects summarizes the case as follows on their Fair Use FAQ's:

In Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, the court found that such a use was minimally -- or not at all -- transformative, since the article ultimately served the same purpose as the original copyrighted work. The initial posting of the article was a verbatim copy of the original with no added commentary or criticism and therefore did not transform the work at all. Although it is often a fair use to copy excerpts of a copyrighted work for the purpose of criticism or commentary, the copying may not exceed the extent necessary to serve that purpose. In this case, the court found that only a summary and not a complete verbatim copy of the work was necessary for the purpose of commentary and criticism.

The court also found that although the website solicited donations and advertised the services of another website, the overall nature of the website was non- commercial and benefited the public by promoting discussion of the issues presented in the articles on the website. However, the court found that the nontransformative character of the copying outweighed the consideration of its minimally commercial nature.

Finally, and most importantly, the court found that posting entire news articles on the website had an adverse market effect on the copyright owners.

If you want to explore the issue of Fair Use, one of the best sources I have found on this topic is the "Fair Use FAQ" at ChillingEffects.org, which is maintained by the George Washington University Law School.

Please Respect the Copyrights of Others

Please, the next time you see a really compelling article that you would like to share with others do not copy and/or republish the article elsewhere. Instead, reward the hard efforts of the original publisher of the article by providing a link to the original article along with a brief summary. This will help ensure that the publisher can continue to produce the content you find so compelling.

By Kenneth Barbalace

As part of the expansion of our partnership with CareerBuilder, we have added India to our list of countries that we provide career listings for. The list of countries we currently provide job listings for includes: Canada, India, United Kingdom, and of course United States.

If you are looking for a career that doesn't fall into one of our predefined listings, you can use our careers search box to create your own careers listing. Once you have found or created a career listing you want to monitor, you can subscribe to the RSS feed we provide for your desired listing via your favorite RSS reader or customized home page (e.g. "My Yahoo").

Happy job hunting.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Over the past few weeks I have been working with some freelance writers to formulate my publishing schedule for EnvironmentalChemistry.com over the next few months. If things go as planned (like that ever happens) we are hoping to publish articles more frequently than we have in the past.

This week we will be publishing the third article in our four series on prairie dogs. This article is in its final stages now and should be copy edited in the next day or so. Unless it is superseded by another article we have in the works, next week I expect to publish an article I have been writing on my experience with switching out incandescent lights with compact florescent lights. This article will also include a JavaScript calculator that will help readers predict how much money they might save by making the switch to CFLs.

In May we will be publishing the fourth and final part of our series on prairie dogs and are hoping for a food safety article comparing and contrasting the United States with the European Union. This article will be written by one of our really talented writers who is uniquely qualified to write on this subject as they have worked intimately with these issues both here in the United States and in Europe.

Also this summer I am hoping to publish two series of articles on two issues of concern to all of us. The first series will be on environmentally sustainable technologies. The second series will be on radon in the home, which is a much bigger concern than most of us realize. Both series of articles will not only try to formulate their respective issue in clearly understandable ways, but will provide solutions that the individual consumer can reasonably implement.

With so much coming in the near future this is a good time for you to subscribe to our RSS feed for EnvironmentalChemistry.com or our RSS feed for our "Editors' Blog", to make sure you don't miss any of the great articles that we will be publishing.

By Kenneth Barbalace

It has taken several days of work, but I have just about completed updating the layout of my blog and am now down to final details, like fixing the RSS feed. Once these last details are taken care of, I will update the top menu to link the main site and this blog together as well as begin to link all of the articles to their relevant blog post.

By Kenneth Barbalace

As any long time Firefox user knows, Firefox has never handled the "TITLE" attribute that is supposed to be displayed in tooltips correctly and crops messages/notes webmasters place in the TITLE attribute after a limited number of characters.

From a web development stance, this is a major issue as the TITLE attribute is supposed to be used to provide additional information about links, images, technical terms, abbreviations, etc. The standard work a rounds to this issue use JavaScript to create a faux tooltips (e.g. article descriptions at Yahoo New). The problem with these work a rounds are that they create unwieldy code and cause accessibility issues.

From a website development standpoint this bug creates a real conundrum; does one use the TITLE attribute as it is designed to be used, or does one use faux tooltips via JavaScript? The former is the proper solution from an accessibility stance for disabled users, but around 10% of users would have problems viewing those notes properly. The latter solution creates accessibility issues for disabled users, and would require kludgy JavaScripts but would ensure that the 10% of users who use Firefox would be able to view those notes properly.

Probably the thing that irks me most about this bug is that the "battle cry" of Firefox developers and fanboys to websites that do not work correctly in Firefox is "fix your code and validate to W3C HTML/CSS specifications." Well you know what? This is a two way street. If web developers are going to be expected to make sure their sites properly implement W3C specifications, then web developers have the right to expect that web browsers like Firefox properly support those same specifications.

The really sad thing about this tooltip bug in Firefox is that it has been known and well documented in Mozilla's Bugzilla (see bugs #45375 and #228673) for over six years (since the days of Mozilla and Seamonkey). How long do we have to wait for a bug that creates as severe of an accessibility/usability issue as this to be fixed? Yes I realize that Firefox/Mozilla is a volunteer driven project, however, it is constantly under development and has become the second most popular web browser. One would think that after six years, however, that a few developers could have set some time aside from developing more glamorous parts of Firefox and fix this very basic usability/accessibility issue.

So in my development of my main site http://EvironmentalChemistry.com what was my solution to my earlier question about whether to use the TITLE attribute as it was intended or use faux tooltips via JavaScript? It wasn't an easy decision to make; however, I have decided to use the TITLE attribute as it was intended regardless of the impact it has on Firefox users. After all, Firefox developers have had over six years to fix the relevant bugs I do not think I should compromise the overall accessibility of my websites simply to work around bugs should have and could have been fixed years ago.

For more on this issue and to see how different browsers fare with their implementation of the TITLE attribute and tooltips see http://Webdevout's article on this and their tooltip test suite

By Kenneth Barbalace

Any American who uses the Internet or makes a living from the Internet needs to lobby the U.S. Congress to support "Network Neutrality" and ensure that the public can view the smallest blog just as easily as the largest corporate Web site by preventing Internet companies like AT&T from rigging the playing field for only the highest-paying sites.

Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality. If Congress doesn't take action now to implement meaningful network neutrality provisions now, the future of the Internet is at risk. Do you really want some giant corporation controlling what you can access on the Internet or how you can use your Internet connection? We know we don't.

To learn more about this issue see http://www.savetheinternet.com/

By Kenneth Barbalace

This is well off the topic of environmental chemistry, but I feel like mentioning it anyways. A lot of my success at being able to make my site http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com commercially viable has to be attributed to what I have learned from a man named Chris Beasley who is a real genius when it comes to web publishing. I've known him for a couple of years now through a forum we both frequented. If you are into web publishing or trying to learn how to make your site successful, make sure to visit his blog and forums.

Even publishers of environmental chemistry websites like mine need good advice and wisdom as to how to be successful web publishers and Chris is an invaluable guru on the subject.