But regardless about how you feel about how others use your content, it is important to track it and follow it the best that you can. Even if you have no plans on stopping any potential infringements, finding out where your content is appearing and what is being used can give you an idea of how your content is received, what is attracting the most attention and what topics you may want to focus on moving forward.
However one of the most common forms of copying comes from the RSS feed. Whether it is syndication through a service such as BlogBurst or unwanted copying from a spam blog, most blogs have their RSS republished on the Web at some point.
It can be difficult to search for content in your RSS feed as it changes constantly and many of the sites that might take your content, namely spam blogs, are likely to appear and disappear in the search engines regularly.
However, there is a very simple and powerful way to track your RSS-based content as it is copied around the Web, enabling to either study its use or, if appropriate, take action to stop it. Even better, all that’s required is a simple plugin for WordPress and a free tool from Google called Google Alerts.
A digital fingerprint is a string of characters that is unique to you and your blog. If you enter it into Google, no results should appear, typically such fingerprints are gibberish, a mix of letters and numbers and relatively random. An example would be:
mbr450pol23
Note: Do not use the fingerprint above as Google will eventually pick up this post and any copies of it that exist, hampering its usefulness.
Once you have selected such a fingerprint, you next need to insert it into your RSS feed in a way that causes it to appear at the footer (or in the header) of every entry. If you are skillful with WordPress, you can attempt to edit the RSS file directly, or you can use MaxPower’s Digitial Fingerprint Plugin or the Feed Footer Plugin from Joost De Valk.
Both of these plugins are compatible with FeedBurner.
After you’ve added the fingerprint, as well as any other attribution you wish to provide yourself with the Feed Footer Plugin, it should start appearing automatically on every post that you make, but only within the RSS feed.
Once you have confirmed that this is working, it’s time to set up Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is a free service provided by Google that sends search results directly to your email box or feed reader. With Google Alerts, you set up an alert for a keyword or phrase you wish to follow, in this case your fingerprint, and then are sent a message every time that term appears on the Web.
Many people use Google Alerts to track keywords related to their business, their name, corporate identity or anything else that they might want to be notified of when a page using the phrase is spidered by Google.
In this case, you’re going to use Google Alerts to email you when new instances of your digital fingerprint appear on the Web. To do so, take the following steps.
Once you’ve done that, your alert will be created and you can log in later to edit or delete it. If you chose to receive alerts via email, you should start seeing them shortly, unless your site is new and the content is not being scraped. Likewise, if you chose the feed option, alerts should start showing up in your feed reader as soon as the first results are located.
If everything went according to plan, you should receive near-instant notifications in your email or RSS reader about when your digital fingerprint, and most likely your articles, appear on other sites. This gives you the freedom to monitor their use and, if needed, take action to stop any abuse.
How you use this tool is up to you, but the knowledge it provides can be invaluable for any number of reasons.
The site is designed pretty well. By default all social networking sites are selected however you can choose to only submit to news sites, dofollow sites, pligg based sites and more. There are links to login and register to all social websites and all sites have their PageRank and Alexa ranking next to them so that you have an idea how popular the site is.
I don’t think this is a service I would personally use as I’m only a member of a few social media sites however I’m sure bloggers who use several networking sites will find this site useful.
