Credit card companies continue to anger and frustrate customers with higher fees and ever-changing terms and conditions. At times it seems like every other statement has something else enclosed to revise the terms and conditions yet again.

Wonder where you might go for a better deal? Although it may come as a surprise to some, credit unions almost always offer better credit card deals than the big banks.

One of the major advantages of a credit union is that they are non-profit entities and are actually owned by their members. Consequently, credit unions are often able to offer better deals for their customers. The fact that the interest rates they charge on the cards they issue are capped by regulators also helps keeps fees more reasonable.

Although these facts may send some credit card customers scrambling to open an account with the nearest credit union, there are some caveats to consider.

It’s important to note that not all credit unions offer credit cards. Since about half of the nation’s credit unions do not offer credit cards, you may not have one in your area that does.

Being a member of a credit union does not automatically qualify you for a credit card, however. You still have to go through the application process and be approved before a card will be issued.

Credit cards issued by credit unions often don’t include perks like reward programs, but speaking from personal experience, the credit card issued by my credit union does indeed include a rewards program. If you have competing credit unions that you are eligible to join, you probably want to compare their offers.

Although you may have heard, or even experienced some of the outrageous interest rates imposed by big bank credit cards, credit cards issued by federally chartered credit unions are capped at 15 percent, but can be raised as high as 18 percent due to economic conditions such as the current recession. Credit unions that are not federally chartered are regulated by the state they operate in, but rates are generally below 18 percent.

For a quick comparison, a 2009 study by The Pew Charitable Trusts found that the average interest rate that banks charge on credit cards we between 12.2 percent and 17.9 percent, while rates on cards issued by credit unions averaged between 9.9 percent and 13.8 percent.

Rates are not guaranteed to be lower at credit unions. You may find a better deal from a bank when compared to what is being offered by credit unions in your area. The interest rate that you pay on a card issued by a credit union is subject to adjustment depending on your credit history, just as it will with a bank-issued card.

Fees tend to be lower with cards issued by credit union when compared with banks. The average fee for exceeding your credit limit is about $40 at most banks, but only about $20 at most credit unions. Banks also tend to a fee for a balance transfer, while only about 25 percent of credit unions impose those kinds of fees.

Cash advance fees also differ between banks and credit unions. Banks average between 20.2 and 21.2 percent, while credit unions average between 10.2 and 13.8 percent.

Some credit unions charge a fee to open an account. Most of the time these fees are very reasonable, oftentimes under $1, but some may go as high as $50.

As someone who has been doing all his banking with a credit union for over a decade, I can say without hesitation that I find the fees and service much better than I did when I had my account at a big bank. My experience with my credit union has been very positive and it hard to think of ever taking my banking business back to a traditional bank.

Welcome back!

I’ve been saying from the start that the meteoric rise in gasoline prices we have been dealing with are like re-living the early 1970’s all over again. I haven’t bought the whole “supply and demand” excuse from the start and I still don’t.

There is no “shortage",” just as there was no shortage back in the early 1970’s. I didn’t know for sure who was to blame back in the 1970’s, and I don’t know who to blame now to be honest. Was it the producers (OPEC) cutting back to drive up the price? Or maybe the speculators trading oil futures up to ridiculous levels on rumors of wars, or the possibility of hurricanes and other natural disasters.

By the way, unless you are a high-level government official, a Wall Street Fat Cat or an OPEC official, you do not know what really caused the price of oil to increase so dramatically either, but I’m always open to hear the theories and speculation of others, with one caveat. Keep it civil or your words will never see the light of day on this site.

Anyway, that really wasn’t what I intended to talk about. I really wanted to talk about the possibility that we are being shafted by the gas station operators or perhaps their suppliers. Here’s what I’m getting at:

As we all know, as soon as we hear about the price of oil going up, we start to see it reflected almost immediately in the prices we pay for gasoline, heating oil, propane and other related products. Naturally, some of us ask why it is that prices come down so much slower than they go up.

If I’m not mistaken, a common reason that’s offered by the retailers is that they have tanks full of product that they paid a high price for, and they have to hit their profit margin in order to stay in business. Therefore, they can’t sell that existing inventory to us at a significantly lower prices than they had to pay for it, which pretty much makes sense to me.

If that’s true, shouldn’t it work the other was as well? When we get word of an oil price hike, how is it that we see a rise in gas prices almost immediately? Aren’t those same tanks full with product that they have paid a lot less for than the current rate? Shouldn’t the prices remain relatively stable, since they are selling us gasoline that they paid a lower price for when compared to the current price?

This is something I’ve been contemplating for a while, but what prompted me to write about it was this particular news item from Yahoo! Finance News today. Go ahead and read it and then see if you see anything wrong with the big picture.

Did you see it?

If not, I’d like you to take note of this particular statement from the article: “The price of crude oil has tumbled 54 percent from its peak of $147.27 reached in mid-July.”

Are you starting to see where I am going with this?

Check this article out from CNN Money from just a couple of days ago.

Here is the key statement from that article: “Gas is down 22% from a month ago and nearly 30% from July’s peak price of $4.114 a gallon.”

I think you know where I am coming from now, don’t you?

If oil is down 50% from its peak of $147.27 in July when we were paying the peak price for gasoline of $4.114, why is gasoline down only 30% from July’s peak? Shouldn’t gasoline prices be 54% lower now than they were in July? If so, we would be paying $2.057 per gallon for gas. I don’t know how much gasoline is going for where you live, but where I live it is currently around $2.95 a gallon. The math tells us something fishy is going on.

How does this make sense? They’ve been telling us from the start that this whole crisis was a supply and demand issue with regard to oil, and since there was not enough supply to meet the demand, the prices had to go up. Well, oil is down 54% from its high. Why isn’t gasoline also down that much?

It’s things like this that really convince me that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we will probably never know about that really stinks badly.

Have you read any of the fine print on the back of your credit card statements lately? If not, you might want to take a good look at one of them. And it would probably not be a bad idea to give it a look every time you get a statement in case they make any changes.

I was carrying a pretty good balance on another credit card, and was getting killed on the interest payments every month. About half of my payments were paying down the balance and half of the payments were going right into the pockets of the credit card company.

This was not a surprise to me. I know how they work their magic with the intent of keeping people in debt to them as long as possible.

Then I got an interesting offer in the mail from the Discover Card people a few months ago. I already had a Discover Card, and had used it a bit here and there but not very often, and I did not have an outstanding balance on it.

The offer was pretty attractive, they were offering me 0 percent interest until next summer. I thought it would be nice to have the entire amount of my payments going towards paying down the balance for almost a year.

Just to be sure I would not be getting in over my head, I called Discover Card and asked them if they could give me a rough estimate of how much my monthly minimum payment would be if I did transfer the balance to them. The woman on the phone told me approximately what the payment would be, which turned out to be pretty much in line with what my minimum payment was for the other card I was paying every month.

It sounded like a no-brainer. I would be paying about the same monthly minimum, but all of the money would go towards paying down the balance until next summer. I transferred my balance to the Discover Card and felt that it was a pretty good deal.

Since then I made two monthly payments to Discover. The monthly minimum was a little higher than what the woman on the phone told me, but only about $10 more so it was no big deal.

My most recent Discover Card statement arrived about a week ago, and you can imagine my surprise when I saw that the monthly minimum had suddenly doubled in size. No, that’s not a typo – the monthly minimum payment had doubled!

This was quite a shock to me, and did not really fit too well into our current budget, so I was not very pleased about it, and I decided to give Discover Card a call to find out what was up.

When I reached the customer rep on the phone (who actually was very nice, by the way), she explained to me that if 90% of your balance is from a balance transfer, they raise the minimum balance by changing the percentage of your outstanding balance that is due every month from 2% to around 4%.

There was no explanation as to why this was the policy, but you’d think they would be more grateful that you transferred your balance to their card, and not be blindsiding customers with a doubling of their minimum payments. After all, it’s unlikely that my entire balance will be paid off by next summer, and at that point, they stand to start making money of the interest rate that kicks in at that time.

As I said, the woman I talked to was very nice, and she offered to lower my rate back to 2% if that was what I wanted. I told her to go ahead and do that and thanked her. Kind of strange the way a phone call was all it took to bring that monthly minimum payment right back down again.

I’m going to confess that I may not have read that original balance transfer mailing they sent me, and perhaps somewhere in there, it mentioned the increase in the minimum payment and I missed it. Still, that does not explain why my first two payments were pretty much in line with what I was told before I transferred the balance and then suddenly doubled without any warning. The woman I spoke with at Discover Card before I made the transfer made no mention of the payment going up.

If their policy is to charge more for balances that are made up of 90% or more of a balance transfer amount, why was that not reflected in my first two payments or imparted to me by the woman I called at Discover before I went ahead and initiated the transfer?

That smells a little rotten to me.

Anyway, I was glad to get the minimum payment back down to where it was, although they would not let me off the hook for the statement they had already sent out, so I do have to make one payment that is double the amount when I first started making payments to them.

The main point is, make darn sure you know what you are getting into when you decide to go with one of these 0% balance transfer deals or anything else a credit card company or bank is offering. Ask a lot of questions and make sure you get the all the details of the deal.

This time the case is clearly do as I say and not as I do, because I should have taken the extra time to understand every detail of this balance transfer deal. It all ended well, since my minimum payment will return to what it originally was, but it could have become nasty if they refused to do that.

The bottom line is that there are very few companies in the financial industry (perhaps any industry) that you can trust. Who knows, maybe there are none. Look at the mess the global economy is in now and its partly due to the greed of big financial institutions who were passing out mortgages like candy to people who could not afford to keep up with the payments. So much for the CEOs and other MBA geniuses that run these institutions. They’ve contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Nice going, guys!

As I’ve said before, these telemarketers are a persistent bunch. At 9:18 this morning the phone rang it was my friends from Chase again. The fellow that called had a thick Indian accent, so apparently the big greedy credit card companies are now outsourcing out-going calling services (I had only encountered these when making a call to a company previously) to these cheap-labor overseas call centers now because God knows, credit card companies have such a hard time making money, and we all know that no Americans want these call center jobs!

Anyway, he told me he was calling on behalf of Chase and I told him, “I know.” He said, “OK” and proceeded with his script and advised me he was calling in regard to my Chase credit card account.

He mentioned the big payment I made recently that resulted when I transferred the entire balance over to a 0% deal and he told me they appreciated it. Yeah, I’m sure they did! They just lost the profit they were pocketing by snagging half of every monthly payment I was making! I’m sure that made them dance with joy and pop champagne corks!

At this point, the true nature of the call became apparent. He said he wanted to “survey” me in an effort to improve their customer service or some other bunch of crap like that.

He then asked me if I am using another card with a different percentage rate. If I had answered him, he would have likely tried to lure me back to Chase with some low-interest deal, but at that point I stopped him I was not interested in answering any questions, and further advised him that I completed their automated procedure to add me to their “Do Not Call” list the last time they called (and there was nobody on the line).

He then when through the standard spiel about how it takes 30 days to complete the process of adding my number to the list (for the life of me, I cannot imagine why!) and I “may” receive more calls from Chase during that time. For the sake of the telemarketer that makes that call, I hope not.

Well, that’s CitiMortgage and Chase so far. Perhaps Chase will offer me the opportunity to file an complaint against them with the FCC at some future date. Time will tell.

By the way, with my latest CitiMortgage statement there was a little flyer in there entitled “Your Choice To Limit Marketing By Our Affiliates.” I can’t help wonder whether this has anything to do with the complaint I filed against them with the FCC recently, or whether or not it’s just a coincidence.

More on that subject later.

I just saw a report about a ticket scam on our local Fox TV station and I thought it might be worth mentioning with the hope of warning others about these kinds of scams.

A woman and her daughter who are all huge Boston Red Sox fans bought a tour package from a local company. The package included tickets to two Red Sox/Yankees games at Yankee Stadium in New York City.

When the women arrived at Yankee Stadium, they were not allowed in since the tickets they had been given were already used.

I was not aware of this, since I don’t buy tickets very often, but apparently, you can buy tickets online and print them out yourself these days. Very convenient, but like any other convenience it tends to open doors for criminals who figure out ways to exploit these things.

It should be noted that the company that sold the women the tour package was not to blame. They bought the tickets off of eBay, assuming they were legitimate. In fact, the guy that sold the tickets to the tour operator was not even the one to blame!

It turns out that the fellow who sold the tickets to the tour operator also purchased them on eBay from a guy who turned out to be a crook. The TV station’s investigative reporter attempted to track the crook down but since he had used a phoney address, the reporter had no luck finding him.

Certain unscrupulous individuals are purchasing these “print-them-yourself” tickets and just copying them and selling the same tickets to multiple victims.

The good news for the women who would up at the gates to Yankee Stadium with bogus tickets is that they were somehow able to get in to see the game anyway. It was not clear how that was accomplished, but it sounded like someone from the Yankee’s organization arranged it or something like that.

The advice from the reporter was to make sure you use a credit card if you purchase any tickets online since you can file a complaint with the credit card company and have a much better chance of getting your money back.

Anyway, for people looking to purchase tickets to various events, I do know of a legitimate ticket seller on eBay named Michael. I have worked a little bit with Michael, talked to on the phone on more than one occasion and I know he is on the up-and-up.

If you’d like to check out Michael’s eBay ticket listings, here is the link:

Michael’s Tickets

Now that my complaint to the FCC seems to have silenced the calls from CitiMortgage and their "affiliates," another company has decided to disturb the peace in my home.

This time it’s Chase Bank and since I do have a Chase credit card, they are allowed by law to make telemarketing calls to our home. The timing is a bit strange since I cannot ever recall receiving a telemarketing call from Chase, and I just recently transferred the balance on my Chase card to another credit card which had a very attractive 0% offer for a year. Since about half of the payment I was making to Chase every month was going straight into their coffers and half was being applied to my balance, it was not a difficult decision.

Perhaps Chase makes a habit of calling people who have paid of their credit card balance and try talking them into some other loans or something.

It was 5:15 PM when the phone rang today and 800-601-9330 showed up on the caller ID display. This time it was one of those cases where there was nobody on the line. Apparently, there was no telemarketer free to grab that particular outgoing call, which as I understand it, is made by machines.

I called the number back and was greeted with a recording that said "Welcome to Chase" or something to that effect. It then advised me that if I wanted to apply for a Chase credit card, I had to call a certain number and if I wanted to talk to a customer representative, I would have to call another number.

It then informed me that I could add my telephone number to their "Do Not Call" list by pressing "5," which is exactly what I did. I went through the procedure and was advised that my number was added to their "Do Not Call" list, but of course, it may take up to 30 days for it to be processed. Imagine that, in the age of computers, it takes them 30 days to remove a phone number from whatever dialing machines they are using.

Hopefully, I will not be hearing from Chase again. If I do, there’s a good chance I may just cancel that card and be done with it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

OK, I guess you could say that I’ve had it. Somehow, the work-at-home scammers have obtained one of my e-mail addresses and I am starting to receive these work-at-home scam e-mails.

I’m going to show you the one I got today. I am not going to change the name of the individual who sent it. It’s probably not his real name anyway and the e-mail address is probably fake as well. Anyway, here is the e-mail I got from this particular scam artist:

How can I tell this is a scam? Well, just visit the link that was placed in the e-mail message three times to see. Like all work-at-home scammers, they are trying to sell you a membership to some useless work-at-home site or system or whatever it is. It’s usually just a bunch of information or lists of companies they hire people to work at home but most of them are out-of-date or for companies that don’t exist any longer.

This looks like all the other work-at-home scam pitches, with the screen shots of the supposed earnings and of course a fantastic discount price of $49.99 (normally $139.95).

Well, the real value of this crap he’s selling is roughly equivalent to what normally comes out of the rear end of a bull.

Here’s the one thing you never want to forget about any work-at-home offer or any kind of job offer! If they are trying to sell you something or are asking you for money for any reason, it IS NOT a legitimate opportunity.

I wish these scam artists like "Mario Ramas" would go find themselves and honest way to make a living. I’m really getting sick of seeing this crap in my e-mail.

I came across a news story today that reported on how happy both Dish Network And DirecTV were to learn that a U.S. House committee has agreed to continue moving forward on an bill that would ban the imposition of state sales taxes differently for different video providers.

Apparently, six states have imposed taxes on satellite TV service, and despite their legal efforts, the satellite TV companies have not been able to get the taxes struck down. The companies argue that satellite TV service has no local presence in their states and is therefore not subject to state sales taxes.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable argument to me, but apparently greedy legislators in six states don’t see it that way. After all, there are mismanaged projects to pay for in some states, like Boston’s "Big Dig" for example. Check it out.

Although the bill still has a long way to go before passage, the satellite TV companies are hopeful that the new measure will become law.

Really, is there anything politicians in some states won’t tax? I left Massachusetts about 10 years ago, partly to avoid high taxes there. I live in New Hampshire now, where the tax burden is much more reasonable.

We have no state income tax, no state sales tax and no state capital gains tax. All of which Massachusetts still has, and our highways and roads here in New Hampshire make the roads down in Massachusetts look pathetic. I know from experience since my parents still live in Massachusetts and I’ve been down to visit them many times in recent years.

The old argument against people who said they wanted to leave Massachusetts and move to New Hampshire to escape high taxes used to be that the property taxes were a lot higher in New Hampshire. At one time that was true, but from what I hear lately, Massachusetts has caught up with New Hampshire.

My parents are now paying about the same amount in property taxes on their home as we are. Our homes are of similar size, although their lot is about three-quarters of an acre and we have almost 20 acres. I think the old argument about high property taxes in New Hampshire vs. Massachusetts is dead.

I do not know if Massachusetts is one of the states that has imposed a sales tax on satellite TV, but it certainly would not surprise me if it was. It continues to amaze me how we seem to get by quite nicely here in New Hampshire with no income, sales or capital gains tax. Why can’t Massachusetts do the same?

You know, I would not be surprised to receive a tax bill in the mail some day from the state of Massachusetts with an amount that represented each day of the year that the wind blew into New Hampshire from a southerly direction and we Granite Staters were all were all breathing Massachusetts air.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any new ideas. Not that I’d pay the bill anyway.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a while, or simply don’t watch television, you’ve probably seen the commercials about digital TV. In February, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all TV signals be transmitted in digital format. All analog TV broadcasts must end at that time.

If you currently watch TV with a standard antenna to receive your local stations and do not have a digital-capable TV or you do not subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you are going to be out of luck when February rolls around unless you get a new television, subscribe to cable or satellite or get a digital converter box for your current television.

Since the subject of this article is regarding my experience with digital TV, I’ll just refer you to DTV Answers where all of this is well explained.

My experience with digital TV began about a year and half ago when I upgraded to an HD-capable television and an HD-capable DVR (digital video recorder) from Dish Network. I had been a Dish Network customer for quite a few years and finally decided to upgrade to HD and now I cannot imagine going back to standard definition television.

Although Dish Network offers just about all of my local television stations as part of their programming packages, they do charge extra for them. However, the Dish Network DVR also allows you to connect a standard television antenna to it and receive broadcasts from your local area television stations, but only if they are digital broadcasts.

Since all of the television stations in my area are currently broadcasting both analog and digital signals, I am able to receive all my local stations using a standard roof-top television antenna connected to my DVR.

What I noticed immediately about the digital broadcasts was that they were much better quality than their analog counterparts. The difference was quite dramatic with many of the local stations. There were some local stations I could hardly receive with our old analog set that were now crystal clear on the digital broadcast, using the same roof-top antenna.

I honestly do not know why this is the case. I wondered if the digital signals were being broadcast with more power than the analog stations. In any case, local broadcasts that were previously plagued with interference and weak signal strength were now being received with remarkable clarity. I was impressed.

Although I believe digital television is better than analog television, there are a few issues I have observed while watching digital TV that appear to be unique to that format.

For example, in my experience, digital TV seems more susceptible to weather conditions. There have been a few occasions where I have lost the signal during inclement weather — something I never experienced with analog television. The old analog signal may have gotten a bit snowy or jumpy, but I can never recall totally losing an analog signal due to weather conditions.

Digital TV is also less forgiving when it comes to signal strength. With an analog set, you could often get away with watching a weak signal from a distant station if you were willing to put up with the "snow" and other interference that resulted due to a poor signal. With digital TV, you either have a signal or you do not.

Since the DVR provides a signal strength indicator for local channels, I have determined that any signal that drops below 60 or so will result in a total loss of the broadcast. I guess you can think of a digital TV signal as a light switch in the sense that it is either on or off — there is no in-between.

The signal strength indicator also confirms my observations regarding how the weather influences digital TV signals. Under certain conditions, like heavy rain for example, I have noticed a significant drop in signal strength, and at times even loss of the signal entirely for short periods of time. This type of thing may depend on your location relative to the stations broadcast facilities. I happen to live a fair distance from most of the stations I regularly watch, but I also live in an area that is well elevated, which normally provides very good reception.

Overall, I’m pleased with digital TV. Like any new technology, there will be some problems and perhaps even a few areas where it is inferior to analog TV. Like the ability to pull in that station 100 miles away, even if you had to put up with all that interference.

The switch to digital TV could be problematic for viewers in remote areas who are far away from their local stations since the digital signals are just not as forgiving as the analog signals when you are dealing with reception in fringe areas. Some may be able to switch to satellite or cable television in those instances.

For people in urban areas and who are reasonably close to their local stations, I think digital TV will be a welcome change. It also allows for the broadcast of HD programming. Not only that, but the HD programming from your local stations received with a good roof-top antenna will be just about the best quality HD programming you will see with the possible exception of fiber optics, since the local stations do not have to compress their HD signals like the cable and satellite broadcasters do.

February will be here before you know it, so if you are still watching analog TV using a standard antenna, don’t waste too much time before you do some research and sign up for those $40 vouchers the government is making available to help ease the transition to digital TV. In many cases it will allow you to pick up a converter box by spending just $10 or so out of your own pocket.

If you are someone who has a blog, you are likely to be familiar with the very popular WordPress blogging software . I use it for my blogs and its hard to imagine a better and more flexible blogging platform.

In addition to the WordPress software that the makers provide free-of-charge, they also have a site on the web where people can sign up and create their own blogs without worrying about all the technical aspects that go along with setting up the WordPress software on your own domain. It’s one of many sites out there that allow you to sign up for your own free blog using their resources.

As I mentioned, I use the WordPress software for my blogs, and always set them up on my domains so I can have complete control of them. It allows me to make customizations and install features that would not be possible if I hosted my blogs on the WordPress.com site. The WordPress.com site is primarily for people who want to quickly set up a blog and get started without worrying about all the technical hassles.

One my my WordPress blogs is pretty popular and receives pretty decent number of visitors each day. One of the problems you take the risk of running into when you have a popular blogs is content theft. That’s when someone who is too lazy to create their own content steals the content from your blog and posts it in its entirety on their own blog, as if it were their own.

Content theft is very easy to accomplish and there really is no technical solution that prevents someone from taking content from your blog and posting in on their own. This is commonly known as "scraping."

There are, however, other methods you can employ to put these lazy bloggers out of business.

I don’t normally spend time searching around the web for content that has been stolen from my blogs, but I recently discovered that someone had been stealing my content quite by accident.

Google has a service which they call "Google Alerts." This service allows you to select a number of keywords that relate to a subject that you are interested in. Google will then periodically e-mail you news articles or web sites from around the internet that match your interests. It’s a pretty cool service, and is quite useful if you are regularly searching for new topics to write about on your blog.

I have set up a number of Google alerts that relate to the subject of my most popular blog and when I make a post on my blog that matches up with one of these alerts, I usually get an e-mail from Google Alerts with a list of sites on the web that relate to that subject, and includes a link to my blog. This might be taken as an indication that Google considers your blog or site worthy or important enough to include in it’s alerts.

Google was indexing the content of my blog (quite quickly in most cases) and then including that content in any alerts it was sending out that were related to that content. I thought that was pretty cool.

Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed that my content was not showing up very often within the Google alerts. I had not really made any significant changes to my blog or had any technical problems with it, so I was wondering if Google has lost some respect for my site.

Then one day as I was browsing through my e-mail and reading my Google Alerts, I noticed the headline of an article that I had written on my blog. The strange thing about it was that it was not listed as being an article from my blog. I clicked the link and was taken to a site that someone had set up on WordPress.com that contained the article I had written.

As if that wasn’t bed enough, Google Alerts was giving credit to a content thief who had stolen my content to use on his own site instead of giving proper credit to the original author of the article – me!

Needless to say, I was not at all happy to discover this and was determined to take action against this lazy individual who apparently has no problem stealing original content from other bloggers.

In my haste to notify the administrators of the WordPress.com site, I used their standard contact form to let them know about the content theft that a user of their service had perpetrated. I also made a comment on the offenders blog, asking him to remove my content.

Only later did I discover that WordPress.com had a dedicated page with a specific procedure for reporting content thieves that were hosting blogs on their site.

Despite the fact that I did not use the recommended procedure for reporting the problem, I received a reply from one of the administrators at WordPress.com in a short time, asking me to provide links to the original content on my site that had been stolen. I promptly e-mailed him the information he requested.

A short time later, I received and e-mail message from the same administrator who told me that they had shut the offender’s blog down and the offender would have to contact the administrators before he could get his blog back online. Sure enough, when I tried to reach that blog, I got nothing but a message telling me that the blog was disabled.

I decided to check up on it this morning and the blog had returned. All my content that I had reported to the administrators of WordPress.com had been deleted. Having not done an exhaustive search for content stolen from me previously (it may have taken hours!) I decided to do so this morning.

As I scrolled through the various pages of the blog, I did indeed find one more post that was stolen from my blog and I began to compose an e-mail message to the WordPress.com administrators to point them to stolen content that still remained.

Having reached page 15 of the blog and finding only one stolen post remaining so far, I tried to advance to page 16 and was greeted with a message that read "The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available."

My guess is that most or all of the content on that blog was stolen from other sources, and the author decided to avoid the possibility of further problems and simply shut it down. There was also evidence that the creator of that blog (I really should not refer to him as an a"author" under the circumstances) was using an automated software program to scrape content from other sites to post on his own site. Yes, these kinds of program exist and are commercially available for the lazy blogger.

The evidence that he was using automation was the large number of pages on his blog that contained duplicate posts. Some pages had the same post listed a dozen or more times. Clearly a problem with the automation software he was using to scrape content from other sites.

It’s a common thing among bloggers to share a little bit of comment. That’s what RSS feeds are for. For example, some sites use the headlines from my blog on their own sites and perhaps even a paragraph or so of the actual article. What makes that OK, is that they do it ethically, by not including the entire article and also posting a link to my blog which brings more visitors to my blog — something the aforementioned content thief was not doing.

Some of us work hard and put in a lot of time working on our blogs. In fact, the content theft would not even bother me so much if I did not see evidence that search engines like Google were giving credit to another blog for content that was stolen from my blog! That’s what really annoys me.

Anyway, the real point of this post, other than educating a few people about content theft, was to extend kudos to the staff at WordPress.com for taking very quick action and shutting down the blog of a blatant content thief. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing for some other hosting companies I have dealt with in the past when I encountered situations like this.

If you want to start a blog and don’t feel that you are tech savvy enough to set one up on your very own domain, I highly recommend WordPress.com as the place to set up your blog. They obviously have their act together and take their business and responsibilities very seriously.