Advice for Beginning Bloggers
Category: Internet... Navel Gazing...
Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 02:32 PM [GMT-6]

LinkVendor offers a free service that most bloggers are likely to find interesting. It's a back-link list generator, meaning that it will compile a list of the websites that are linking to your site. Now, I realize that there are many similar services, but this one is different from most in that it includes more than just clickable links. It also shows those sites that are stealing your bandwidth.

If that sounds harsh, let me explain. Some people have a habit of using images on their sites without actually loading those images onto their web servers. Instead, they link to the images where they currently reside. This means that whenever you visit their site and view that image, the bandwidth associated with the image is actually coming from the image's host server and not the site you're visiting.

This is bad manners at best, and harmful at worst. Depending on the popularity of the "borrowing" site, the owner of the site housing the "borrowed" image could actually incur additional out-of-pocket expense due to increased bandwidth.

I point this out because when I ran the LinkVendor report for the Gazette, I found about half a dozen sites that were doing exactly what I describe above. In some cases, the offense was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the "borrower" included a text link and/or attribution of the image to the Gazette, but in a couple of cases, they just slapped links to my images on their sites, making it look as if they owned them. And one of the offenders was a revenue-generating blog. (It's only fair to note that when I pointed out how little I appreciated what they were doing, they immediately removed the image. I think that falls into the category of "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.")

If you're a new blogger – or even an experienced one who never thought about this practice – please don't take shortcuts and link to images residing on servers you don't control. (We haven't even touched on the associated copyright issues.)

If you want to use an image that appears on the Gazette on your personal blog, just ask me. 99.9% of the time I'll gladly grant that permission, and I'll bet that most bloggers will do the same.

To do otherwise is bad manners, if not downright theft.