TinEye is a new image protection program

TinEye: A possible way to protect your online images

It’s happened to a good many of us: Stolen blog posts. Have you been scraped? If you haven’t you’re among the minority. While Copyscape deals with text-based plagiarism, detecting the theft of images has been something of a conundrum. Until now. TinEye is a new image search that detects copies based on pixels, not on text. Users upload an image and TinEye searches its database for probable duplicates or derivatives.

Jonathan Bailey at PlagiarismToday posted a great review of the possibilities and current limitations of TinEye. This is technology that all photographers with a web presence should be interested in.  Don’t get scraped, protect your online images.

Taiwan Photographers moves to WordPress

Carrie’s and her global mind in Asia, has moved her brainchild, Taiwan Photographers, to WordPress.com. Citing the considerable power of WordPress compared to Blogger (boo, hiss!) Taiwan Photographers now has a brand new bag.  Stop by and see both Carrie and the new/revamped Taiwan Photographers.

Lonely Planet Photo Contest
Lonely Planet Guides and photo-sharing site Pikeo have announced a travel photo contest. Have your travels taken you to London, Paris, Barcelona, or Istanbul? Did you take a stunning photo of the city? Submit it! Four winners will have their images featured on the covers of upcoming Lonely Planet’s new ‘Encounter’ guides for each locale.

And as they say on game shows, that’s not all. Winners will also be jetting off to India, Russia, Morocco, or Kenya. Runners-up and commended entries will also receive prizes.  The Lonely Planet Photo Contest is open to residents of UK, France, Spain, USA and Canada. For details see http://lonelyplanet.pikeo.com.

Change of Address
Erica at blissfultravel.wordpress.com has moved to travelblissful.com. One of the great travel sites on the web, she now enjoys her own, stunning domain. Stop by her new digs and read what’s ahead for the revamped site.

SEO Tips
RT Cunningham, an ex-Marine in the Philippines, has written a great 7-Part series on Search Engine Opimization (SEO) for your blog. Need the skinny on SEO, SERPS, building backlinks, and generating more traffic? Need SEO Tips that work? Read RT’s UV SEO Series to get the 411.

The Tianhou Temple, near Shekou, Shenzhen, China.

Captured: July 12, 2008.

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It’s Friday morning in the Middle Kingdom. I’m off to Hong Kong to pick up my new axe.

I’ll be staying in palatial cheap basic accommodations. My last trip to HK saw me staying at the YMCA. I don’t know what reputation The Y has in other parts of the world, but in HK it’s bomb diggity.

I’ve found some cool new blogs this week (well, new to me) and wanted to share. Give these folks a read, they have something interesting to say.

I mentioned Christine at almostfearless.com earlier in the week. She has a great post about how to receive your mail, in a virtual sense, while overseas.

Julie at Collazo Projects has an interesting piece on flubbed journalistic endeavors and gives her commentary on the Ann Curry/Ingrid Betancourt interview.

Want to do cool, free stuff in Boston? World-traveler extraordinaire Nomadic Matt has the answers in a recent post.

Theresa and Jeff of Livesofwander.com are leaving for a year of world travel. They have some interesting posts and neat things to say. Their site offers readers a chance to vote on where the couple should go on their epic adventure.

Signing off for the weekend. Stay chilly, I’ll try to stay dry.

Image courtesy of the BBC

Quite some time ago I made a comment regarding a popular blog and the degradation of culture - leading to the end of the world. No, I don’t remember who’s blog it was on. One of the Usual Suspects, most likely.

Time Magazine agrees with me. It’s good to know I am still at the forefront of original and ingenious thought.

With thanks to the LFC.

Remember I said The Stevos’ have a secret?

No, I’m not gay. (Sorry Grandma, I know you want to march in the Pride Parade.)

No, my wife is not really a man as some have speculated.

No, I’m not a cyborg, although that might be cool. An English-teaching version of Robocop?

Stevo has lost his fat belly? Well, that’s not really a secret.

What’s the secret? Why has The Stevo lowered himself to posting a photo of a cat on his blog? (What did cat lovers do before the internet?)

Wait and see.

Better yet, enter and see.

That’s right, asianramblings.com is holding a contest. If you can guess The Stevos’ secret you’ll be a winner. Well, you’re already a winner in my eyes for reading this post. After all, there is a photograph of a cat.

What will I win, you ask.

The person that first correctly guesses The Stevos’ secret will win their own domain name installed with WordPress and hosting for one year *. That’s right, free!

I’ll post clues over the next two weeks. Email your guesses whenever you like. Enter early and enter often.

* Some restrictions apply.

Photo by: thedepartmentofme