Thanks to Hacker News I found out about a tiny service called Tracer that helps you track what’s being copied from you website.
How does it do it?
After signing up with them you are given a piece of Javascript code to insert between the <body> tag of your website (if you have a blog then you can paste it in the “footer.php” page and it will appear on all of your blog’s pages).
You can see and analyze the source of the Javascript code here : http://tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js (don’t worry, you don’t have to paste that big Javascript into your webpage! You will get another code which is a lot less).
See it in action on MyTestBox.com.
Highlight some text there (or text and image) and, when you release the mouse button, look at the status bar…you will see how the script intercepts the event and connects to the Tracer website right away. That means your action was recorded. The same happens when you right-click on the highlighted text and copy it into the computer’s memory. Paste it into a text editor or email. You will see the backlink the script adds to that copied text. When you click that link you’ll be redirected to the original webpage with the section that was copied highlighted for easy reference.
You can login to your account and, on the dashboard, you can see what’s copied (text or/and images), the total number of monitored pageviews, the number of the words copied, and the total number of how many times a user selected or copied from you page.
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I see the usefulness of the service but there are certain things than can certainly be improved.
1. The user copies the text and paste it into an email (or a webpage). However the backlink to the original post can easily be removed by the user. How will Tracer prevent that from happening?
2. On the reporting side if would be useful if snippets of the copied text could be added as a reference so you can look on Google or Copyscape to see who used that snippet on his webpage (at least).
Anyway, the service is still in beta so it’s likely to still see improvement.
To see a demo of the service click on this link http://tracer.tynt.com/tracer-demonstration .
It seems the service has been online since last March but only recently has it seen traffic skyrock(according to Compete).
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