In three-plus years of writing this column, here's a first. If this were a newspaper, the dateline would read "St. Petersburg, Fla.," and would be accompanied by a photo of me on the beach.
I got to spend a little time at Poynter HQ this morning. Of course, many people were on vacation, but there were still plenty of folks at work on what is traditionally a wevy, wevy qwiet week. But it isn't just at Poynter; judging from the number of messages still filling my inbox, there's another tradition afoot: using this time to catch up on e-mail, clear voicemail backlogs, and to read/work without the usual office distractions. Presuming there are enough of you catcher-uppers out there, here's a Web Tip for you.
Since the dot-com-bust death of FindSame.com a few years ago, I have been looking for a free tool that can help find examples of plagiarism. I recently came across one such tool. It's called
Copyscape and works pretty well. Enter the URL of a page of content you wish to track and it will send you a list of webpages that contain most of the content on your page. It uses Google (what else!) to scour the Web, but isn't affiliated with Google (it's run by the same folks that created GoogleAlert.com).
Here's the description from the "about" section:
Copyscape is dedicated to protecting your rights online, helping you fight against online plagiarism and content theft.
Copyscape finds copies of your content on the Web. You can use Copyscape to identify sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you. Simply type in the address of your original web page, and Copyscape does the rest.
Copyscape's Global Web Rights campaign provides the tools and information you need to protect yourself against content theft and copyright violations on the web.
Here's an example provided by the site, tracking copies of the Declaration of Independence. And here's my example: I typed in the URL for my Smarter Surfing links into Copyscape and discovered this stolen copy. Not all items you find this way will necessarily be stolen articles. You might also be led to citations and other ways people are spotlighting your work.
One of the folks at work today was Bill Mitchell, Poynter's director of publishing, and we tried Copyscape together. Among other links, we found this PDF version of Al's Morning Meeting by Al Tompkins (Al was another person working hard today).
Right now, you only get the first 15 results of each search. I presume in the months ahead you will see a rollout of more features and a charge for premium users.
Your turn: send me sites you like at poynter@sree.net (include your name, affiliation and city)
Sree's Links: