I’ve posted about this subject before in “How to Deter Scrapers and Hotlinkers“, which discusses a bit more of the hands-on and some web based tools you can use to help protect your content.

Many of us have may have read all sorts of articles and other blog posts that delve into the legalities, copyright laws, rights and so forth. That’s not something I’m going to discuss as I think there’s too much discussion (and not enough action). If not, just take a look on Google and you’ll find a plethora of posts on the subject. The fact of the matter remains that we can file as many DMCA notices, cease and desist letters, etc. as we want. Often the content thief (called a “scraper” or “splogger”) does not care. After all they already have your content and you can cry and stamp your feet as much as you want – Many of them will simply not budge, especially if they are out of your geographical area or jurisdiction.

A case in point, on one of my other (self hosted) wordpress blogs, several pages were regularly being lifted by a web site in China. The only recourse was that Google removed the stolen content from search results (the hosting provider, etc. did nothing) – Even though Google was removing their search results, that didn’t stop them from adding more (from my stolen content)! Locally (North/South America and Europe) however, that blog has had a 100% success record in take downs of stolen content found on blog sties such as wordpress.com (Automattic), blogspot.com (Google), etc. Providing I followed their DMCA procedures, all issues were resolved.

In my opinion, this approach is ineffective, costly (with long distance faxing) and quite frankly a waste of time (at one point I was filing about 15 DMCA’s a day for that blog). Why? We need to be proactive not reactive! A client of mine uses the tagline “Predictable is preventable” for his blog and security business. And he’s right! We need to deter, curtail and control such theft attacks against our blog content.

It’s difficult to stop such activity, until you can see it occurring, as such, I hope the following tools will help you:

Grab yourself a copy of Antileech. It’s a plugin that does not stop sploggers, rather (in the developers words) “…produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content…” The benefits here are that sploggers seldom read all the content. They have an automatied system grabbing thousands of pages – And now they will have backlinks to your original content, inviting the reader of the splog (containing fake content) to visit your blog instead. That’s link love!

Another effective tool in your arsenal is ©Feed, which allows you to place a digital fingerprint and copyright notice in your content feed (RSS). For those not familiar, in most cases, your RSS is used to facilitate content theft. What’s RSS? Common Craft’s video below easily explains it:

In the words of the ©feed developers “…You can use html. You can add the IP of a feed reader and digital fingerprint for an explicit key. There can also be a domain name for a whitelist and this domains became not the message [sic]. The plugin search for this key at content theft [sic]. It is furthermore possible to add comments and related posts to the feed. For the related post feature it uses a database-search for the content. You can use the plugin “Simple Tagging” for related posts in a feed. The copyright notice can be added even when using entry excerpts…”

Needless to say, the above two tools are very robust and take a proactive approach.  There are some other resources I’ve bumped into over time, that provide good reading and further insight:

• Jamming the scraper signals
• How You Can Stop Dirty Feed Scrapers In 3 Easy Steps
• Benefiting from Blog Scrapers
• Google – Duplicate content due to scrapers

Hopefully the above helps you (especially those who emailed me asking)!

Do you have any good solutions? What tools do you use? Feel free to comment your thoughts below.

Side note: Many of these applications are also available to my Linux friends (and Mac) too.

For all those who asked, and those interested to know, I’m sure something on the list below will be useful:

1) eMail Communication.

Thunderbird is an email client that features intelligent (learning) spam filters, spell checker and customizable layout. It provides IMAP/POP support, HTML email composing, email search, address book, advanced message filtering, address completion, import tools, and multiple email and (RSS) newsgroup accounts. You can add extensions for extra features including:

• Quicktext email template creation and for super fast addition of predefined text snippets to an email message.
• Display Mail User Agent so that you can better see what application is sending you email. This helps in avoiding spoofed email. For example, Google is never going to send you email using Outlook Express.
• Duplicate Contact Manger helps you avoid duplicated contacts in your address book.
• Multi Language Dictionaries allow you to customize your spell checking option.

2) Web Surfing.

Firefox helps you browse web pages faster (for improved researching), more safely, and more efficiently. Some good features are pop up blocking, tabbed browsing to let you view multiple web pages in a single window, and opening links in the background so that they’re ready for viewing when you’re ready to read them. Again, there are several plugins I use, which may also aid you. Some of the ones I find most helpful (among others) are:

• Add Bookmark Here 2 is an extension that facilitates adding your bookmark to any category without wading through the menu system.
• Colourful Tabs creates a different colour for each tab. It makes tabs easy to see and easy to switch too when I have an excessive number of tabs open. (Which happens often when I’m conducting online research).
• Copy Plain Text helps me avoid the formatting when I am copying text between pages and blog posts. Nothing’s more annoying then copying text to find it’s also duplicated the font, colour, font size, etc. This extension gives you the choice to copy something as plain text only.
• Kgen allows us to see which keywords are strong on our blog post and pages. Then we can use them on social sites as more effective (and relevant) tags or for SEO (Search Engine Optimization.
• PrintPDF enables a simple print to pdf function for Firefox. Simple and useful.
• Read It Later is one of the tools I use the most! Sometimes I don’t really need to keep a bookmark of a page; I just need a way to flag it for later reading. This extension does just that, it helps me avoid cluttering my bookmarks with pages I’ll probably only read once or twice.
• Reload Every will reload a web page every so many seconds or minutes (that you set). It is very useful for pages where the content is changing. For example, I use it when sniping items on eBay, (this allows me to place a bid at the last possible moment). It’s an automated way to keep refreshing content in your browser window.
• SEOQuake is a robust tool that helps with SEO and Internet promotion. It’s an intelligence and investigation tool that simplifies your access to pagerank, indexing, keywords, social site inbound links and other features.
• TagSifter is a way to tag each bookmark you make (with one or more tags). This makes searching for bookmarks or related bookmarks, faster and simpler.
• Update Scanner is useful to us when a site does not have an RSS feed as it monitors site changes. It also helps us monitor changes to pages (also when the changes won’t be found in a site’s RSS feed).

3) File Uploading.

Filezilla is an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application that allows you to upload and download files to and from your server. One useful feature is the ability to resume (in case the connection to your web hosting server is interrupted. Most of us will use the Filezilla Client (not Server).

4) Content Mirroring.

HTTrack helps keep a local copy of all your blog content on your local PC. While I always stress that you must keep an off site, current backup of your blog files and database in your possession at all times. This tool will maintain a full copy of your blog content on your PC, or on your laptop. It also allows you to display your blog when a web connection in unavailable.

5) Web Browsing Safety.

PeerGuardian helps protect us form visiting bad sites as it maintains an IP blacklist. If a web site or blog is hosted on a blacklisted IP, PeerGuardian will intervene to safeguard you.

6) Offline Blogging.

w.bloggar is a tool that I can take with me (on a USB flash drive). It allows us to edit posts when we are not connected to the Internet. It also allows us to create posts when not connected to the Internet. Our content is save locally. When we have a connection we can simply publish our changes and new posts and voilà, they will appear in our blog.

7) Healthy Blogging.

Workrave helps me in preventing of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). It frequently alerts me to take small pauses, rest breaks and restricts me to my daily limit. I find I’m in front of the PC all day and this application helps me avoid not only wrist, arm, shoulder and neck pain; but also helps avoid eye strain.

8) Accounting Information.

GnuCash is a personal and also a small business accounting package. I like it because it is cross platform friendly (meaning I can use it on Linux and Windows). It’s easier to use than the name may suggest. <Smiling here>.

9) Presentation Creation.

Wink is a great tool for those of use who need to create tutorials and presentations for our blogs.

10) Traffic Building Tool.

TweetDeck, being one of the most recent applications I use to monitor twitter as well as communicate with twitter users. It’s simpler to use (in my opinion) than some of the other applications I’ve tried. It helps me break down the communication into manageable chunks, that way I’m not spending excessive time on twitter.

11) Document Creation.

OpenOffice helps me create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. I use it to create seminar presentations and documents for my blog clients. Again, there are a fair number of extensions that allow you to improve upon features and enhance your blogging productivity: Open Office extensions.

12) Graphic Creation.

Gimp helps me retouch photos or create new images. It also comes with a long list of plugins, from which you can select and install.

13) Time Tracking.

ToDoList facilitates time tracking using timers you can activate when you are working on a task. It helps make time tracking painless and improves productivity (as you can see where your time is spent and where you could better spend it). You’ll notice it has lots of other features too.

14) Desktop Publishing.

Scribus is a desktop publishing software that with an intuitive interface; usable for press-ready documents. Again it’s cross platform ready, so I can create print page layouts on Linux, Mac or Windows.

15) Data Backup.

BackupPC is my favourite automated backup system. It back up all the important data on my blogging computer to another server (which in my case is on an internal network). It helps prevent data loss if my PC fails (saving my contacts, documents, bookmarks, images, PDF’s, etc.)

As may be evident, there’s not a lot of “extra” software installed on my “Blogging Box” (the PC I use exclusively for blogging). It’s a lean, mean machine. Humour aside, one aspect to good applications and good productivity is to eliminate the “fluff” and interruptions in your work flow. Again, one huge benefit is that all the software is free, there is no cost.

While I’m sure many of you may have seen or use other applications I’ve not mentioned (or may not have considered), this list is by no means exclusive. What applications do you think are good for bloggers? What big omissions have I made? Comment below and let us know what else should be on this list.