Why You Should Track Your Content

On my main site, Plagiarism Today, I talk a great deal about finding people who are misusing your content and how to stop them. However, not everyone is interested in stopping plagiarists or scrapers, many don’t care if their content is used, no matter the capacity. Other still take a more centrist approach and use Creative Commons Licenses to encourage at least some forms of distribution.

However, Even if you never intend to stop a single infringer, tracking your content, understanding how it is being used and following it as it circulates the Web is extremely important.

The reason is pretty simple, on a Web where anything can be copied, with or without permission, one’s audience is no longer limited to their own site. Rather, one’s audience is wherever their content is and that can be on the four corners of the Web.

If you want to fully understand and take advantage of the impact you have on the Web, as big or as small as it may be, you need to be where your work is, not just where you put it.

It’s Your Audience
The Web of today is significantly more crowded than the one that existed just a few years ago. Not only are there infinitely more sites, but there are more opportunities for works to be copied, shared, cited and commented on. Sometimes this reuse is legal, sometimes it isn’t, but it takes place.

This means a lot of great things for authors. For example, their readership goes beyond, often many times beyond, what is on their own site. For every pair of eyeballs that counts as a “visitor”, there may be two or three that see the same work elsewhere. This can increase exposure and increase one’s reach many fold.

However, it also fragments the conversation. The author, who often isn’t even identified when the content is reused, sees only a tiny sliver of the feedback and commentary on their work, This limits their ability to enjoy praise, learn from mistakes or otherwise grow.

The conversation isn’t just happening via email or one’s own comment form. It’s not just happening at Digg, Reddit and other social news sites. It’s happening on forums that copy and paste works, on aggregators that other blogs. Every use of one’s content, infringing or not, is both an opportunity and a problem.

However, that problem can be mitigated if the author expects this kind of reuse and plans for it. If the author can be where his or her content is, not just where it should be, then they can partake in the full conversations, measure their audience more closely and, if needed, deal with infringements.

Furthermore, following your content lets you see which works are reused the most often, letting you know which are viewed as the best. It lets you better see the types of people interested in your work and lets you see how those with differing opinions read into what you say.

It is your content and it is your audience, it makes sense to track it and understand it.

Tracking Your Work
Back in February, Billy Mabray wrote here about a service known as FairShare, which is one I’ve also touted heavily on my site. For bloggers, there is little doubt that it is the best tool they can use, especially for free.

FairShare works by taking your RSS feed and producing another for you to subscribe to. It will then scan the Web looking for your content and place any matches it finds int the new feed, complete with information about how much content is being reused and if the site is complying with your CC license.

FairShare is a powerful tool that uses the same matching technology as Attributor, which is a system used widely by large news publications, including the Associated Press, as well as book publishers. However, FairShare does not provide of the resolution assistance and case management of Attributor, just the matching.

On that note though, if you’re a blogger who wants to track their work, it’s a free and easy to use service that can do just that.

If you work primarily with static content, such as literature, you may be better off using Google Alerts. Google Alerts lets you create a search, in this case a quote from your content, and then be emailed or have an RSS feed updated when new sites appear with that term. Many use it for vanity searches but it is also very powerful, and very easy to use, for non-RSS based content.

Bottom Line
Your audience is no longer defined by the number of visitors you receive at your site. Your audience is where your content is, wherever that may be.

If you haven’t bothered to track your content before, it might be worth taking at least a quick look, perhaps by just running a phrase or two from one of your works through Google to start. You may find that there is a whole world of people out there who have read your work, commented on it and even been moved by it, but you’ve never met.

Until you understand where your content is, you can never understand your impact or your reach. Looking is the first step, deciding what you want to do with whatever you find is the second.

So if you haven’t, take a look today. It only takes a moment.

Disclosure: I have consulted for Attributor.

Source : bloggingtips.com