DISQUS

Congratulations! :)

Thanks for posting about that. I have suspected for a while that Xanga had a small staff. They've been experiementing with new advertisements to try to bring in more revenue, despite the money they get from premium subscriptions.

I suspect that they have a cash flow problem that cannot be resolved by bringing in more employees, since the extra expenditure would have to be matched by increased revenues. Instead, they need to seek an automated/technological solution to the problem. This seems to me to be a massive project that would have to be patented and extensively beta-tested. If indeed they are working on such a solution, they may be smart to keep quiet about it until they've sealed their intellectual property rights.

Thanks for the informative article. It helps that you mentioned that many plagiarists don't include links back; the ones who have copied me so far do link back, as I think it helps their own SE rankings to have relevant anchor text.

I might try putting the same unique phrase into each of my articles and then configuring a GA to hit me whenever that phrase shows up. This may help me catch plagiarists that don't backlink.

I'm sorry to hear that this is still happening. I've also found, as you mentioned in your previous post, that Xanga blogs take a long time to be indexed by Google and usually don't rank very well. Perhaps there's a reason for this.

I've got a blog on their servers, and I get the impression from my experience there that the company may be in some financial trouble. They've recently put new, quite large, ads at the top of the free blogs, and apologized for these ads by saying that they need more money to support the company. The free accounts also don't have much control over the templates. Even the paid Premium accounts don't offer as much template control as Blogger.

The main reason I've stayed with Xanga is their well-constructed community-building system. I stopped using my account in February, though, since the search engine rankings are so dismal.

Thanks for the information about Scrapbook! I've found that Yahoo Desktop Search can also be helpful. The program indexes my entire hard drive so that I have any information I want at the command of "search as you type" functionality. I think YDS should be able to index the files created by Scrapbook as well.

Interesting idea! I assume you have methods in place to block spammers. :)

I think that's a great idea. Please let us know how it turns out.

This appears to be a great implementation of a very creative idea. Before I heard about this, I had been hoping to rely on the Internet archive (archive.org), but my sites still haven't been indexed by their bot, and there seems to be no way to submit a URL. The Internet Archive also wouldn't be a very good way to have proof of ownership of e-books that are sold through CJ or other sites that don't publish the entire work online.

I've got a couple of ideas that might make it easier for ESBN generation to be automated. I'll e-mail Chris about them. Thanks for this informative review!

I've read several sides to this issue, since I'm a member on a number of Web development and SEO boards. People sell programs that obtain content by scraping other sites and offer this as "easy content" for a fee. In response, Google clamps down on duplicate content and sometimes excludes the original sites' content in favor of the plagiarizers'. Then people try to get on Google's case about this because of lost traffic. In the end, we all lose, since Google will eventually ban the plagiarizers, legitimate Web masters will lose traffic, and Google will spend millions of dollars trying to develop better algorithms.

Human nature sure is rotten, but hopefully more of us will decide to do something about it. :)

Thanks for the interesting review of CopyScape. It's interesting that CopyScape isn't returning the same results that Google is, since Google offers an API that allows Web developers to access its search results directly. This API is only made available under a special license to commercial developers, though, so perhaps the functionality is limited in those cases.

Richard Hamming gave an interesting speech about how scientists can turn problems into research opportunities:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Maybe the problem of plagiarism is also a research opportunity for people like us, research to help curb a problem that is both immoral and illegal.