A digital fingerprint can be thought of as your own personal googlewhack, or a search query that generates only one result. Consider the following example, one of the worst possible digital fingerprint choices would probably be the end with over 400 000 000 million results indexed in Google. It would not be possible to distinguish your own the end’s from other the hundreds of millions of other web pages that contain that phrase.
However, if we add a single word to the end we can create a unique and personal fingerprint, the lunchbox end has never been written (until now) on the Internet. If I were to include the lunchbox end on all pages of my website, then whenever I search for the lunchbox end the only results that come up should be from my website.
This is the principle behind Digital Fingerprint, a plugin from WordPress. By creating your own personal digital fingerprint and including it wherever you like, you can then detect its use in the wilds of the Internet. Should that phrase be used and detected, you can investigate its use. Could it be that someone has copied your work? The Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress will help you become aware of potential plagiarism and content theft by scrapers. You can read more about the plugin here, and the remainder of this article focuses on some simple rules and thoughts for creating your own unique digital fingerprint.
Your digital fingerprint will primarily be placed in every post (that you indicate) found within the RSS feed for your site. As such the only people who will actually read this fingerprint are your RSS subscribers. With them in mind, using the lunchbox end is probably a bad phrase because it could very easily confuse the reader. Here are some tips on selecting a good digital fingerprint that also minimizes confusion for the reader:
- The shorter the phrase or word the less likely to be noticed
- Don’t use HTML — most splogs simply strip it out before reposting
- Picking a phrase that smears doughnuts almost makes sense will cause a lot of confusion, see?
- Using completely gibberish words is fine, cromulent yos chernosi?
- Kijk uit voor woorden en uitdrukkingen in andere talen (watch out for words and phrases in other languages)
- Always test your phrase before adopting it, simply go to Google, Yahoo!, or MSNsearch and search for your phrase making sure that you have enclosed it in quotes “like so”
- You may be familiar with the infinite monkey theorem which postulates that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will eventually type out your digital fingerprint. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect your Digital Fingerprint. Just remember that coincidences happen and you are allowed to change
Any common sense tips to add?
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22 Sep 06
5:27 am
Hello,
I like the idea of this, however, it was a technique developed a couple of years ago and it has been abused because there is nothing to stop me taking the digital fingerprint from a popular blogpost and putting in on a product page.
GK
22 Sep 06
6:50 am
[...] Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that’s Right for Me by maxpower [...]
22 Sep 06
7:46 am
True! However, as far as I can tell the only motivation to do so would be spite. No one is going to gain or steal traffic from doing this, and your finger print is changeable at any time.
23 Sep 06
1:19 am
[...] Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that’s Right for Me by maxpower [...]
23 Sep 06
8:10 am
[...] Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that’s Right for Me by maxpower [...]
23 Sep 06
9:35 am
[...] Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that’s Right for Me by maxpower [...]
23 Sep 06
9:51 am
Very interesting indeed! Our how-to is up as well if you’d like to check it out!!
25 Sep 06
2:03 am
[...] Scroll down to Digital Fingerprint Options and input a digital fingerprint. For guidance and help on choosing a fingerprint read, “Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that is right for me.“ [...]
01 Oct 06
10:59 am
As this unqiue text is inserted into the RSS feed (the fingerprint) I would recommend putting in inside its own paragraph. e.g. your fingerprint term is as follows: your_unqiue_fingerprint
Why? Well I followed your recommendation and put my fingerprint at the start of the first paragraph and at the end of the last paragraph. When reading this in a RSS New reader, the fingerprint is displayed as normal text and, in my terms, buggers up the professionalism of your own content.
I am inserting my fingerprint onto the end of my posts now and I have made part of my fingerprint self explanatory so as not to confuse the human reader.
I know this makes the fingerprint stand out more, and may make it easier for the copycats to extract this string, but there are many types of formats you can use, and it would take a spammer a long time to construct an algorithm to catch all these fingerprint formats.
01 Oct 06
11:04 am
whoops, in regards to my previous post. They plugin code already inserts the and so you cant use this!!! sorry.
02 Oct 06
6:08 am
The Dutch translation for watch you used, horloge, means wrist watch. In this context the correct word to use is kijk.
A delberate mistake?
03 Oct 06
2:06 pm
Rob: thanks for the correct usage, my dutch is only as good as babelfish
Discontas: I couldn’t find reference to me saying stick your fingerprint in two different places. I suggest only using it once. How and where you choose to use it is up to you. There are no hard and fast rules!
Thanks for your comments everyone.
06 Oct 06
8:46 am
[...] http://www.maxpower.ca/choosing-a-digital-fingerprint-thats-right-for-me/2006/09/21/ [...]
24 Nov 06
6:27 pm
I am a WordPress customizer (www.CustomizeWordPress.com) and I add this plugin to all website that I’ve worked on since finding this plugin. It has helped me to determine the sploggers who are using my content. Thanks for creating this plugin.
Kim
http://www.A3WebDesign.com
http://www.CustomizeWordPress.com
30 Oct 07
10:20 am
bernie mac…
Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..
19 Jul 08
1:44 am
[...] Scroll down to Digital Fingerprint Options and input a digital fingerprint. For guidance and help on choosing a fingerprint read, “Choosing a Digital Fingerprint that is right for me.“ [...]
01 Nov 08
11:41 am
In a world of copycat plugins, this is a nice find indeed.