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New Tool Tracks Down Possible Plagiarists on the Web
Plagiarism is obviously rampant on the Web and in the blogosphere. A free tool I just came across called "Plagium" (PLAY-jee-um? PLAGUE-ee-um? PLAY-jum?), however, claims that it can help bloggers and other writers identify when their work is being used elsewhere on the Web.
The Plagium blog notes that the tool allows bloggers and other writers who are concerned that their text might be stolen "to track the usage of a chunk of text or the contents of a URL over time." An Alert feature is also available: "Simply enter your text or URL into Plagium. Plagium does the work from there. Each week you will receive a notification of the status of the text or content usage."
Why not just plug the same text into Google? Plagium says that Google and the other search engines limit the number of terms that you can enter into the query, "typically on the order of 10 to a few dozen terms." Plagium, however, can accept much larger blocks of text so that all of your content is evaluated, not just the words at the beginning of your document. Plagium also claims that it uses a proprietary technique that intelligently breaks up the input text into smaller “snippets,” and that these snippets are matched in a way that produces "a much cleaner view of possible matching documents -- a view that is much less noisy than the results offered by the major search engines."
I just tried it out, and found at least one "re-publisher" of a LBW post I wrote earlier this week that I'd never seen before. Try it yourself here.
Posted by Bruce Carton on February 5, 2010 at 11:07 AM | Permalink
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