How does the Daily Mail make this happen? {Updated}

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Zee

Former CEO of The Next Web. A fan of startups, entrepreneurship, getting things done faster, penning the occasional blog post, taking photos (show all) Former CEO of The Next Web. A fan of startups, entrepreneurship, getting things done faster, penning the occasional blog post, taking photos, designing, listening to good music and making lurrrve.

Paul BradShaw at the Online Journalism Blog spotted an interesting feature that the DailyMail seem to have incorporated into their site.

When copy and pasting any text from the Daily Mail to your own blog/site, the following is appended to the end of the text:

“Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial-brain-reality-just-10-years-scientists-claim.html#ixzz0MC7nJ4Ml”

I’ve no idea how they manage to do it, and like Bradshaw, am unsure how I feel about it.

I suppose its easily enough removed and not really an intrusion, but there is a definite element of surprise and awkwardness in being coerced to give that link back.

Developers, how does it work? Bloggers and journos, what are your thoughts? Clever and valuable or intrusive and needless? Try it out yourself.

I should note, it only seems to happen when copying and pasting text and inserting it into html.

*Update*

It’s an app called Tynt Tracer which monitors the content (text and images) being copied from your site, Tracer tracks it and adds an attribution link, what’s more, it appears to do it for free. To get started, sign up and just add one line of JS to your header. (Thanks to Mahendra Palsule at the always awesome MakeUseOf.)