Or perhaps you've surfed web and noticed a really great article which has an author different from webmaster. Some sites even seem to have whole collections of these articles by many different articles.

What's going on? Well, there are some not-so-secret stashes on web which actually contain hundreds if not thousands of articles that you can reprint on your web site or in your ezine (and even in an ebook if you want). The only cost is to also include "resource box" of author.

A resource box is a few lines of text, similar in concept to an email signature. This box contains a short advertisement or biography, a link to a web site and perhaps a link to join a newsletter. Usually they are four to six lines long, although eight or nine lines is also common.

How do you take advantage of this phenomenon? You simply subscribe to one or more mailing lists set up for precisely this purpose. Once you do so, you will get several articles per day (usually) in your inbox which are available for reprint.

If you find an article which is useful, you simply add it to your publication along with resource box. Don't change anything at all unless you get written permission from author, and be sure to send a quick email to him letting him know you've used his work.

Viola! Instant, useful content for your publication! That's literally all there is to it.

Okay, so what does author get out of this? He gets a small amount of advertising and a link to his website. That's what resource box is all about. The hope is that occasionally someone will read article, find it interesting, and click link to go to authors website.

No, this is not some insidious plan of Orwellian proportions aka 1984. In spite of what newspapers would have you believe, this information is not being maintained in some East German, cold war style database. The purpose is much more mundane, and much more innocent. Believe me, very few webmasters have time or inclination to look or care about what you personally have done on their web site.

This tracking is simply a function of every decent web server on planet. It is essential to management of any credible web site. In fact, if you are a webmaster who has access to your server logs, you can determine exactly what's going on with your web site at any time. If you cannot get to your server logs (and few free hosts will give you that access) then you are stuck with counters and such, which are a poor substitute for real thing.

What kind of data can you get from your server logs? (Note that Hitbox and other similar services provide many of these functions as well.)

How many visitors do you get for each page of your site? - This is very important so you can determine where to concentrate your efforts. For example, if page A gets 100,000 visitors and B gets 10, then you might want to sell ads on A and somehow improve B (or eliminate it entirely).

How long are visitors staying on each page? - A very useful piece of information which can tell you if people are actually reading your pages or just surfing past them.

What pages are your primary entrance pages? - In spite of popular belief, visitors gain access to your site in every way possible. It's often true that majority of your visitors may never even see your home page. This kind of statistic allows you to determine which pages your visitors are landing upon. Armed with this information, and you can determine areas of your site which deserve your attentions. For example, if majority of your visitors are entering your site on page NNN instead of your home page, perhaps you want to include very obvious links to your index on that page.