Uniqlo U-Shop, U-Win

Last Friday, I was given the opportunity to attend the launch of Uniqlo’s new game app called U-Shop, U-Win.

Uniqlo U-Shop U-Win


Uniqlo U-Shop U-Win

(The launch was held at Fully Booked in BGC as a nod to the opening of Uniqlo’s third store in the country at SM Aura Premium on May 17, 2013.)

Uniqlo U-Shop U-Win

the U-Shop U-Win virtual store game

The U-Shop, U-Win game app on the Uniqlo Philippines Facebook page allows participants to “shop” at a virtual Uniqlo store. Read more

Why I No Longer Use Creative Commons on My Blog

Recently, I’ve started to question the wisdom of offering my written works under Creative Commons. A long time ago I started using Creative Commons licenses for my blogs. I was inspired by my editing on Wikipedia (which asks you to license with Creative Commons everything you create on that website) and thought it was a great way to allow people to quote freely from my blog. “Hey, this will get the word out about my blog!” were my thoughts.

When I began optimizing my other blog Kikay Runner for better placement in search engine results, I also checked on the RSS feed I provide via FeedBurner and noticed that a website was listed under “Uncommon Uses”. RSS feeds are commonly used to bring your blog posts directly into email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more. An Uncommon Use could be “a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam.”

So I went and checked it out and found dozens of my posts from the RSS feed auto-reposted on another blog (what is called a “scraper site“). Worse, there were no links back to my blog and aside from the short footer appended by Feedburner to each post on the RSS feed, there was no attribution.

If there’s anything I could be thankful for, it’s that I had the foresight to offer only a summarized feed. Google penalizes websites with duplicate content, but sometimes it can’t distinguish between the original source and the copy (so both source and copy are punished by lower ranking in search results). Because I’d only put a portion of each blog post in the RSS feed, a large amount of my blog’s content remained unique. This means if people search on Google for a topic I’ve written about with my own spin, they’re still more likely to find my blog instead of the scraper site.

Aside from reporting the copyright infringement to Google so that the scraper site would not appear in search results, I also changed my RSS feed settings to be even more stringent. Instead of 400 characters in the summary I limited it to 200 characters, and worded the post footer more strongly by saying “If you see this on a website that is not KikayRunner.com, it may have been used without permission.”

Scraper sites have justified their actions in the past because of a notion that RSS feeds are free for syndication anywhere. The Creative Commons license also allows for copying with attribution (even without permission).

My words are precious to me; they’re an extension of how I express myself, so they’re an extension of me. So when another site reposts my blog posts without attribution, without my knowledge, without my permission, I feel violated.

I realized that I needed to retain more control of how my work is used online. People still have fair use rights when they want to quote me, but if they want to use my words for anything else (like creating an entirely new website!) they will need to get in touch with me.

Noelle De Guzman is It Girl for March at Nail It! Salon

Kikay Runner is Nail It! Girl for March 2013

An It! Girl (or It! Couple, since they featured Heima co-owners Bong and Rossy Rojales in February) serves as a good example, empowers her fans/followers/co-workers with her abilities, functions for a good cause, is multi-hyphenated and juggles different jobs or titles, and is influential in her own way.

Past It! Girls include fashion blogger Camille Co, film director Marie Jamora, and international designer Mich Dulce.

This March, when you visit Nail It! branches at Alphaland, Pearl Drive, Katipunan, Rockwell Ortigas, Glorietta 3, Greenhills, Loyola Heights, Better Living Bicutan, Festival Mall, SM Valenzuela, and Centris Walk Quezon City, you’ll see some info slides about me on their LCD screens.

Kikay Runner is Nail It! Girl for March 2013

For more information about Nail It! Salon and their services, follow them on Twitter and Instagram and like them on Facebook, or contact them via 0917-5-NAILIT.