You don’t have to know HTML or anything about it to be a blogger. But many do. Those of you, who are familiar with HTML tags, will appreciate HTML Tags Illustrated. For more images, check Visual HTML Jokes pool on Flickr.

Those of you who have no idea about HTML would probably want to catch up a little bit now…

mandarine has an excellent post about theft and piracy. It explains what is the difference in simple and clear terms, as well as offers a couple of examples.

My view on piracy is different though. I do consider piracy to be a form of theft. And I do so not because of all those “need to be paid” reasons.

For me, it’s all about respect of copyright (I am mixing up copyright with ownership on purpose). When one creates content (I prefer this term to “intellectual goods” or “intellectual property”, because often those goods or property have nothing intellectual about them, yet are valuable), he (or she for that matter) has the copyright over said creation. That person (or organization for that matter) has the right of saying who and how can use that content.

Piracy disregards that fundamental right. Pirates don’t care what the creator of the content considered as acceptable terms of use and distribution. Until the content is pirated, the content creator has control over his creation (as vague as it may be). After the content is pirated, the content creator loses any control of it.

Right or wrong, this is how I see it.

What’s you stand on theft and piracy?

Google Reader blog features this post about little addition to Google feed indexing software - now, part of the user agent shows the number of subscribers to the fetched feed. That’s useful, especially for statistics.

But the juice of the post is somewhere else, I think. It’s the link to the page “Google Reader: Tips for Publishers“. There are many similar pages on the web. And most if not all of that information has been widely known before. But it’s not about the news. It’s about what Google, the most popular search engine on the web, suggests to do.

Bloggers write a lot. They do. I myself do plenty of drafting, idea dumping, and touch typing. But how often do we think about writing? No, I don’t mean it in the matter of “good writing” and “boring writing”. I am talking about symbols.

Just consider for a second how many languages are out there. Some of them we don’t notice, because they are so native and natural that they are integrated into our minds. Others seem complex. Yet others we don’t even know about.

But the symbols are here. I want to say letter, but I can’t. Not every language even has a letter. Some use signs. Others, even more complex signs.

We do all these symbols come from? There are so many of them, that sometimes I think they are random. Or some of them at least. But that’s not necessarily true. Most probably, somebody somewhere thought out each of those symbols. One by one. Generation by generation. Then they proudly moved those symbols around, teaching them to others. And those others were making mistakes and misinterpretations. Their media wasn’t perfect. It caused its share of troubles.

But still. Just think about it. Every letter that you type, every letter that you don’t type - is a result of somebody’s work, somebody’s thinking process.

… why do I suddenly want to make my own letter? Maybe, because I want to leave a mark after me. Something, that a lot of people will be using. Caring though generations. And then, someone will think of me. Of my letter. Of my symbol. Or maybe I just want to use one symbol, but my own, instead of all those symbols that were thought out by other people, who I won’t ever know…

Back to typing loads of texts.

Every blogger I know spent a significant amount of time making his or her blog better. Better, of course, may vary a lot, but that’s not the point. Who haven’t played with fonts and colors yet? Who haven’t tried different blogging styles - shorter posts, longer posts, link only posts? Who haven’t searched for the blog on Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live? Who haven’t installed a billion of plugins and themes and then uninstalled them all and then all over again?

Well, if you did all or some of those things, and if you are all out of ideas what else to try, check these 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines. You might find something new. After all, it’s Friday and you can spend some time playing around during the weekend.