Blogger Law 101

Through the serendipity of the internet, I just found a site called Tubetorial, which has a series of videos on blogger law, or "What every blogger needs to know about the law." I've only looked at the first five minute video, which is just an overview. It says the series will cover:

• Trademark
• Copyright
• Defamation
• Marketing and Advertising
• Miscellaneous

This sounds a little ominous. Will you be sued? Does someone already own your domain name? My sense of the blogosphere is that it is pretty wide open and most of us little guys probably aren't in much danger - if our domain name gets taken away, well, we can make up a new one. But it also seems fairly smart to at least be aware of the law and not do unnecessarily stupid things that might make you liable.

So how did I find this site? I've been noticing in the last week that I'm getting a lot more hits from Google image search. But in sitemeter, unlike the regular Google searches which give you the search terms people put into Google, image searches don't do that. So I was looking around to see if someone knew why and if there was a way to get that. That got me to Pearsonified.com
where there was a post about how to write the code on your pictures so that Google search would find them easier. In the comments there were some other links to interesting sites - getting me further away from what I was looking for, but to things I didn't know I needed to know. Including the Tubetorial site that has the Blogging Law videos.

There were some interesting suggestions about how to put tag words into the code for the pictures. I looked at the code that blogspot automatically sets up for one of my pictures and in the alt section it just has a long number, but I put the name of the picture into the .jpg. [I really have no idea what the alt section is, but I could find it in the oode.] Since blogspot is owned - as I understand it - by Google, you'd think they would do the right thing for us blogspot users. Anyway, I am starting to see the image traffic pick up noticeably.

Oh, I learned a new acronym in all of this: SEO - Search Engine Optimization.