Highlighting From Your Own Blog or Website

Jarrett Martineau

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Posted at 10:26 on July 8th, 2009

To address ongoing confusion regarding NowPublic's policy on content sourced from external websites, please note that we require all members to use Highlight (or to manually place in blockquote), any and all content that was first published on a site other than NowPublic.

This includes content that you have written but that was first published to your own blog or website.

If you are posting an original story that was first published on your own blog (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr, etc), use the Highlight tool to quote an excerpt of your original post and include a written introduction to indicate that you are the author of the original post.

Posts that copy text from an external site but are not placed in Highlight will be flagged as Needs Improvement.

Highlight is required in order to provide proper citation to the source material. Quoting an excerpt of your original post will encourage readers to visit your blog or website to read the entire post.

Please note that NowPublic does not condone plagiarism and encourages its members to add original content – in the form of a written introduction or additional written commentary — to their Highlighted stories.

NowPublic encourages members to write their pieces as 50% original content to 50% Highlighted text. Entirely Highlighted posts will not be recommended and may be flagged as Needs Improvement.

While we acknowledge that NowPublic offers tools to allow members to cross-publish to external blogs and sites this should not be used as a tool to mass syndicate your work across many different websites. It is important that we identify content that was first published on other websites, as distinct from posts that were originally published to NowPublic, and that we not have identical posts appearing on many different sites.

NOTE: Posting excerpts from your previously published works in highlight (or blockquote) automatically adds a link back to the source and encourages readers to click through to read the rest of the original. Posting a verbatim copy of an article does nothing to build your blog readership.

generaldecay

at 12:37 on July 16th, 2009

Helpful Jarrett, thank you very much.

Tina Kells

at 11:02 on August 4th, 2009

I want to draw attention to this portion of the post and add further clarification as there is still some confusion:

"While we acknowledge that NowPublic offers tools to allow members to cross-publish to external blogs and sites this should not be used as a tool to mass syndicate your work across many different websites. It is important that we identify content that was first published on other websites, as distinct from posts that were originally published to NowPublic, and that we not have identical posts appearing on many different sites."

Publishing first to NowPublic and then using the cross post to Blog feature in highlight MAY still result in your story being flagged. This is because it is IMPOSSIBLE for search engines to distinguish an original when this is done and may result in 1) the NowPublic version not being listed in search engine results pages, or 2) ALL the posts being omitted from search engine results pages UNLESS they are searched for using the EXACT title. What this will mean is LESS traffic to all the versions of the article than you may get if only one version existed on one website.

I know this is confusing and very technical to many members and I apologize for that, but the reality is that fully syndicated content without a clear attribution to an original is not desirable in the Web 2.0 world. If any member wants further explanation please feel free to contact me directly via private message.