I have been running my recently released plugin, digital fingerprint, here at MaxPower for about 3 weeks. By week three, I discovered that my content is being ripped off (via the rss feed) and reposted on another site in a semi-abbreviated format complete with all the tags I have used. In effect, the splog is stealing all the keywords and SEO of every article I write. No doubt, this post will probably show up there too. » Read the rest of the entry..

Version 0.02 has been released addressing much of the feedback received over the past week. New in this version is the ability to automatically insert your fingerprint at the start or end of a post, or at the end of the first paragraph of every post. Of course, you can still use the Fingerprint button in the Write Post dialogue. However, the option to automatically insert your fingerprint takes precedence over any placement defined in the editor on a per post basis. Also added was the ability to search BlogLines for any reference of your fingerprint, and some general code cleanup. Be sure to read install, setup, and usage details on the main post.

Download WP-FingerPrint-Beta2

Thanks to Lorelle, BLaM, and Plagiarism Today for providing valuable feedback to make this tool better. Keep the ideas coming!

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, » Read the rest of the entry..

Plagiarism and content theft have really intrigued me of late. I got to thinking and came up with an idea for a very simple digital fingerprint for online content. Since content scrapers simply scrape, paste, and profit, they (ideally) wouldn’t notice a small ‘fingerprint’ (a keyword / phrase or personal googlewhack) sandwiched in with the regular text of your content. It follows that your fingerprint is uniquely yours, only those pages and posts where you placed your fingerprint should actually contain your fingerprint. A simple search via google or other search engines could confirm this on a regular basis. If your fingerprint exists on the web it is either coincidence or plagiarism. » Read the rest of the entry..