Article Four in the series Some Parasites Are Good For Their Host. Article One addressed our parasitic, but symbiotic, relationship with Search Engines; and how they could not survive without our “user generated content”. Article Two viewed our symbiotic parasitism (not sure how that word passed the spellchecker) with content submission sites. Article Three in the series provided insight into using forums, content comments, and directories as a good parasite.
If you are a webmaster, like me, you are a parasite! However, we are all mostly good parasites because we are beneficial to our host.
Our host for this article is all about being “social”. If we are social parasites we can inform online socialites to visit our website and spend money. This whole online socialite thing began in earnest with MySpace in 2006. Think of the Internet in “dog years”. Making MySpace in middle age crisis at 35 years old. My gosh! That means, in Internet dog years, I am 168 years old!!! If you forgot your division tables that would be 168 divided by 7 = 24 years online/Internet.
MySpace is dead! Why did it die? The age group (females 13 to 17) was not meaningful to advertisers. Twitter and Facebook are now the top dogs. Man, why am I still writing about dogs> 
Close behind are LinkedIn and, you may be surprised, Flickr. Yes, flickr does belong in the social networking category. Think common interests. In this article your top takeaway as a webmaster is using Flickr in your parasitic strategy. Think Google images and you will understand the importance of posting, with backlinks, to your website. Be a Flickr socialite and you are assured of more traffic to your website.
Images on a website have been important since 2006. They will be critical in 2011. Now, here is your challenge. If you have been the parasite, um, borrowing images from other sites; expect that this is the year you will get your first “cease and desist” demand. Cease and desist is a notice from the copyright holder that you are using one of their images without permission. Pay attention! If you get this notice. A former client ended up paying a $3,000 legal settlement for copyright infringement. The seller had warranted they owned all images, but were not exactly correct. It was a picture of a hotel given them to advertise the hotel. The hotel did not have permission to use the photo on other websites.
Another example of this trend is the aggressive stance of YouTube that began this year. Copyright holders are all over YouTube looking for copyright infringement. This aggression may be seen by YouTube as beneficial to their strategy to carry more paid copyrighted material.
But I digress. 
Your mission as a webmaster in 2011 is to get the “image” of yourself not only as a writer, but as a photographer. …and expect that you too may be sending out cease and desist emails to parasite infringers (is that a word>:) of your photos. …and those would be “bad” parasites.
This is a multi-part article focused on our many parasitic relationships. For example, what if nobody “tweeted”? When we tweet, we give twitter “user generated content”! The objective of this article series is a new basics course for webmasters to hone their skills and be a better parasite!
Article One addressed our parasitic, but symbiotic, relationship with Search Engines; and how they could not survive without our “user generated content”.
Article Two viewed our symbiotic parasitism (not sure how that word passed the spellchecker) with content submission sites.
Article Three in the series provided insight into using forums, content comments, and directories as a good parasite.
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