However, more amateur photographers and artists often times don’t have access to such tools. Though many are free, some feel that it is not worth the time and energy to learn a new application just to watermark the occasional image.

Still, if you upload photos to the Web and worry about how others might use it, watermarking them can go a long way to help protect them. If done right, it provides the only truly secure means of preventing others from plagiarizing your photos or using them commercially.

Fortunately, there are several online tools that can be used for very quick watermarking jobs, Today, we’re going to take a look at three of them and how well they perform.

Watermarktool

Watermarktool has gained a fair amount of attention in recent weeks. It provides a simple, yet robust interface for applying watermarks to an image.

On the positive side, the tool allows you to add a watermark to multiple images at the same time. This can save time and reduce mistakes when trying to do a series of uploads since you only have to set your options once.

Watermark tool offers a great deal of flexibility with the watmermark you add. You can select the text you wish to display, including size font and color, the background box and the transparency for each item. You can also create a “repeating” watermark, which writes the words over the text in a loop, similar to what some stock photography agencies do.

The main drawback of this tool is that it has a 100kb per file size limit. Though that sounds like a lot, most of the images that I have from my cell phone and camera are many times that size and I had to find one that was pre-reduced to in order to test it.

However, once I did find an image that was the right size, the process worked well. Though I had some issues downloading the image as my browser kept wanting to save it as an “HTML” file and not a jpg (This is likely due to the non-standard extensions the site uses when displaying produced images). Still, the end result looks good and serves its purpose. It’s a solid choice over all in this field.

Sample (w/ Default Settings)

BiggerBids Image Watermarking Tool

On the surface, the BiggerBids Watermarking Tool is more robust than Watermarktool. It provides a slew of interesting features including the ability to set an image as the watermark, thus letting you add your logo to an image, you’re given more robust handling of the watermark, including the ability to set margins and alignment, and you can even resize the image.

However, the tool is filled with bugs. I tested this site in several different browsers but was unable to complete a single watermark all the way. Instead, I was forced to restart the process repeatedly to just go through motions a single time.

Uploading images is a gamble as sometimes the uploader seems to hang, the preview feature does not work well, the default font caused characters to disappear, the CAPTCHA only works half of the time and the two times I got an actual image, the first the zip file produced a “file not found” error.

I’ve included a sample below but, as you can see, it isn’t pretty due to errors caused by the default font.

All in all, this is a tool to stay away from until these bugs are fixed. If they’re able to correct these problems, then it might be a worthwhile service.

Sample (w/ Default Settings)

PicMarkr

PicMarkr is a lesser-known online watermarking app on the broader Web that has gained at least some traction among the Flickr crowd.

When visiting the site, it is easy to see why. The tool looks and feels like a Flickr app, down to the colors and minimalist design scheme. However, the simple layout belies a very powerful watermarking tool.

PicMarkr can watermark multiple images at once (up to a 25 mb limit total), grab images from Flickr or from your hard drive, add a text, image or tiled watermark and even resize the image.

The drawback is that you do not get a great deal of control over how the watermark looks. There is only a limited set of options for the watermark itself. All text watermarks are black and white, there are only two opacities to choose from and exact placement is impossible. Similar restrictions exist for image and tiled watermarks.

Still, the watermarks are attractive and fairly effective. They fit well with the theme of the site and the relaxed upload restrictions make it easy to do a series of watermarks quickly on this site. If you can deal with the limited control over the look and feel, it is a great choice.

Sample (w/ Default Settings)

Conclusions

Of these three tools, PicMarkr is the one that stands out. Though Watermarktool provides more flexibility with the mark itself, it’s restrictive upload policy and lack of Flickr integration puts it behind PicMarkr. For Flickr users, there is no contest and for the rest of us, PickMarkr still comes out slightly ahead.

That being said, none of these tools are anywhere near as powerful as basic, freely-available offline apps. Though I can see artists using these when they are stuck without their favorite tools, such as being on a netbook while traveling, even those who only watermark images once in a while would probably be better off with an offline app.

Fortunately, PicMarkr does offer a pro version of its service for download and, as I said earlier, there are a slew of other image editors that can provide the same functionality.

A review of some of those will likely be forthcoming…

However, on the Web, copying is not the only way that content can be reused. As Workfriendly and now Tynt have shown, there are other ways to “copy” a site.

This technique doesn’t require the copycat site to host any of the content itself, but rather, lets it pull the material directly from your site and then make it appear to both search engines and users alike that they are the ones providing it.

It’s become the subject of a great deal of debate on the Web and, as new services come online, seems likely to be an increasing problem.

So how does it work and what can you do about it? The answers are unfortunately not very clear.

How Proxying Works

Most of the time content is copied on the Web, it is done so in a very traditional fashion. It is copied from one location, either by a bot or a human, and pasted to another. This means that two versions of the data exists on the Web, one on your site and one on the second site.

A common analogy would be if you had a text file on your computer, copied the content, created a new file and saved the data to it, thus creating two copies of the data on your machine. Then, if you do a search for a keyword on your computer looking for a phrase in the file, two different files will come up, much like how two different sites come up in Google.

Proxying, however, is different. With it the “copy” site doesn’t physically host the data. Rather, they host a link to it. They load the content from your server, your server providing the information as if the proxy were any other visitor, and then manipulate the data as they see fit.

This means that every time a visitor on their site loads a page with your information on it, their site visits yours, extracts the data and then presents it.

Working with the same analogy, it is as if you created a Word file that, instead of copying the information, simply linked to it, causing the text in the original file to come up on load but the file itself only had a pointer to the data, not the actual information. Those opening the file would not be able to tell the difference and, depending on how you search for the data, your computer might not either. However, the data would not exist within the second file itself.

Proxying is something very different from traditional copying and has more in common with framing than scraping or plagiarism. However, it carries with it many of the same potential risks as traditional copying, including visitor confusion, duplicate content and more.

Why Proxying Is a Worry

Proxying has been around for many years however, it has most commonly been used for anonymous surfing than anything else. Services such as Anonymouse have provided users with a relatively high level of anonymity when surfing the Web.

The idea is pretty simple. Since Anonymouse, or any other proxy service, is loading the Web page for the visitor, the sites they go to only see the information for Anonymouse, not the person loading the site. This makes it harder for a visitor to be tracked.

However, the problem is not with services such as Anonymouse, which use proxying in a responsible manner, but those who are reckless about it.

Proxying itself is not evil, but if it is done maliciously or negligently, it can cause Webmasters a great deal of grielf.

Consider the following issues:

1. Search Engine Troubles: As the Workfriendly case showed, search engines cannot tell the difference between a page that is hosted on a server or one that is proxied. They will routinely index a proxied page unless the operators of the proxy take proper precautions. This can lead to duplicate content issues or even bump original sites into the supplemental index.
2. Bandwidth Concerns: Every pageview on the proxy site causes a page to be downloaded form the original. This might not be a major concern for most sites, but if a proxy site gets a great deal of traffic, it can cause Webmasters to spend a great deal of bandwidth feeding the visitors of the proxy site.
3. Manipulation: Since the proxy site controls what the visitor actually sees, they can do anything they want with the content before it reaches their eyes. In the case of Workfriendly, they manipulated the content so it appears to be a Word document, Tynt manipulates it to add their users stickers and bubbles. Less ethical sites could add their own advertisements, attribution or completely change the information presented.
4. Copyright Issues: Though framing is typically thought of as a form of copyright infringement, making it likely proxying could be too, with no files hosted on the server, there is no means of filing a DMCA notice. This issue routinely came up with those that tried to stop Workfriendly, as the server only had their home page and the script to perform the proxy.

Again, this is not to say that all proxying or even the companies mentioned, are evil, just that it has the potential for widespread abuse and it is only a matter of time before we see more malicious proxying.

The question then becomes, what can be done about it. As I see it, there are two different angles of attack that must be considered.

Preventing Bad Proxying

As a Webmaster, preventing proxying of your content is a difficult matter, especially since most bloggers don’t have the necessary experience or tools.

However, if this issue concerns you greatly, I would recommend the following steps:

1. Host Your Own Domain: Having control over your own server allows you to block IP addresses and prevent anyone from accessing your site that you don’t want to. This includes proxy services. If any site bothers you, you can keep them away at the gate easily.
2. Link To Yourself: Make it clear a visitor what site they should be on. Mention the URL of your site regularly and link to yourself when practical. Not only is it good marketing in many cases, but it also lets anyone who is on a proxy know your actual location. May help with search engines as well. Do be warned that many proxy services will manipulate links to keep their users within their site.
3. Contact Hosts/Webmasters: Though you can not use DMCA notices in the case of proxy services, nothing stops you from writing the administrator and asking to be removed from their service or using any opt out tool they provide. Failing that you can still contact their host with a generic abuse report. There is a good chance such proxying is a violation of their terms of service.

But as effective as these steps can be, I feel strongly that the best approach is not to block proxy services, but to encourage ethical proxying. After all, such services can provide a valuable resource to users and, if done well, can actually help Webmasters.

To that end, I would recommend the following guidelines:

1. No Search Engine Indexing: Any and all pages produced through proxying should not be indexed by the search engines. Though the use of Robots.txt doesn’t seem to have kept Tynt pages out of Google, proxy services should do everything that they can to prevent such indexing.
2. Clear Exit: The proxy should make it clear to the user that A) They are a proxy site and that this is not the original page and B) Provide a clear means for the visitor to go to the original site.
3. No Advertising: Sites that display other pages via a proxy should not display advertising next to other people’s content. Though it is a line that is admittedly vague legally, it is one that a lot of people have an issue with personally and professionally. Any proxy service that wishes to avoid the wrath of Webmasters should pay attention.
4. Limited Manipulation: The proxy should change as little about the site as possible and should never change the meaning or bypass access controls. Areas such as filtering advertising are a gray area, but effort should be taken to ensure that the visitor viewing through the proxy gets the same experience as one visiting the site directly.
5. Clear Opt Out: If a site does not wish to have its pages displayed by the proxy, they should be able to opt out without any difficulties or questions asked. Such opting out should not be predicated on robots.txt or even meta tags due to Webmaster limitations on many free hosts.

The bottom line is that the proxy should behave as transparently as possible, something most proxies do but many in the future will not.

Conclusions

At this moment, proxying is not a major issue. The bandwidth and other resources required to maintain a proxy on a large scale outweigh the benefits to spammers and others that might want to maliciously use the technique.

However, as copyright issues grow and bandwidth gets cheaper, it is a near certainty that some people will start to look at this as an alternative to traditional scraping.

The hope is that both the law and the technology will have caught up to the technique by then, making it less effective and easier to stop.

That is not likely, but there does seem to be some effort on that front.

Patry cites two reasons for closing the site down. The first being that many have refused to accept that the blog was a personal one and not one representative of his employer, Google.

To this effect, I personally have seen his blog quoted many times in the press and almost always associated with Google in some way. However, he makes it clear that Google did not ask him to abandon his site and, instead, encouraged him to write.

His second reason, that he has become too depressed over the current state of copyright, has been the subject of much more conversation. However, once again I am forced to understand his emotions (and often times share them) and respect his decision.

Though he will be missed dearly, I can find no fault in his reasons and can truthfully understand. Instead, I want to take just a moment to bid farewell to him.

A Great Copyright Mind

If you haven’t heard of William Patry, you would not be alone. Though you’ve probably read his writing, seen him quoted and felt his influence at some point, his name is not well known by those who don’t live and breathe copyright news.

Part of this is because his blog was what you might have expected from a 26-year veteran of copyright law, a rundown of the latest rulings, decisions and theories in the field. It was an invaluable resource to those of us who pondered these issues day in and out, but to those with a more passing interest, it was a steep learning curve.

Yet, it was a learning curve well worth taking on. Patry was, and still is, one of the smartest people in the room when it comes to copyright law.

Though his position as head copyright council to Google often put me at odds with his company’s policies, when he spoke on his personal blog, I, as well as many others, listened and we did so with a kind of reverence usually reserved for a teacher. His wise, thorough analysis of ongoing issues were always on the mark and his wisdom came through in every post.

His thorough analysis of current copyright decisions and his balanced, centrist view on the law that made his blog a powerful tool and a must-subscribe for anyone wanting to talk about copyright news on the Web. Both he and his valuable resource will be missed.

Even though it has been several years since I mentioned his blog on this site , save regular appearances in show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show (I stopped covering most copyright news on this site a few years back), his influence has definitely been felt here and on countless other blogs and in the mainstream press.

William Patry’s blog will be dearly missed and I wish him the best with his future endeavors. I feel certain he has made an incredible difference in this area and leaves behind a great legacy.

Still, in a copyright landscape dominated by extremists, his centrist voice will be dearly missed.

Mr. Patry, thank you for everything.

Other Farewells

Technology Liberation Front
RIAA vs. The People
Patent Law Blog
Rob Hyndman

But while the service has a great deal to love about it, including no fees (even for payments), ease of contact for reaching the author and clear attribution requirements when using a work, one of the more interesting features has been largely ignored, including in my original article: The ability to create custom licenses including the ability to edit the description and the full terms.

This is a great opportunity for those who like Creative Commons-style licensing but have not found the exact terms to suit them to easily make their content available for limited reuse.

Fortunately, using it is fairly simple, even if the feature itself is a bit hard to find.

How to Change Your License

Changing your iCopyright license is a simple process that requires only a few steps. However, you have to know where to look for the links and how to use the tools.

Step 1: Login

Visit iCopyright Creator’s Console home page and log in as you normally do. If you do not have an account, you can create one by first visiting the iCopyright for Creators Home page.

Step 2: Go to the Permissions & Services Link

Click the link at the top labeled “Permissions & Services, that will take you to your list of license features and options that you can enable and disable.

Step 3: Set Your Descriptions

Click the “setting” link beside your various licensing elements and it will take you to a page where you can enable the licensing option, change its URL (if applicable) and edit its description.

Please note that changing the description will NOT change it on the Permissions page (this is a possible bug). The change will only be visible on your actual iCopyright tag.

For example, this:

Will cause the tag to look like this:

Step 4: Visit Your “Terms of Use” page

Click the link that reads “Your Terms of Use” in the box at the upper-left hand portion of the screen, it will take you to a page that displays your full license. You can do this on any page in the Permissions section as there is one TOU for all licensing options.

Step 5: Edit Your Terms

After reading your terms of use, scroll down to the bottom and click the link that reads “Edit Terms of Use”, it will bring up a WYSIWYG editor that will allow you to edit the terms of use.

In this case, the changes WILL show up in the Terms of Use page, making it easy to preview your changes. Also, if you are not happy with your changes, you can click the “Revert to Default” link that appears after you have made changes to your license.

Sample Uses

Since license writing is a difficult art that even lawyers often wrestle with, it would not be wise to make any drastic changes to your license terms. Furthermore, since there is no way currently to edit the titles of the licenses, you cannot create a license that goes against the spirit of the original.

However, there are several minor adjustments that you could make that could have a drastic impact on some people’s willingness to license their work.

1. Restrict Licensing: If you are fine with most non-commercial use but don’t want certain groups to use your content, for it to be used in a few ways you do not approve of (ex: in videos) or have some other use you are not comfortable with, you can carve out a small exception. (Note: The license already restricts many unwanted uses)


2. Broaden Licensing: Even if you want to demand that most commercial users pay, you can carve out exceptions such as political organizations that may use your content for fundraising or sites that simply have advertising but earn less than a certain amount.


3. Clarifications: If you get repeated questions about the nature of how your content can be used, you can spell out any clarifications that are necessary.

Though these might be limited exceptions that can be carved out, it opens the door of blanket licensing to a new group of individuals and organizations that may not have been reached by the previous efforts.

Important Note

Editing a license is a difficult process and doing it incorrectly can result in you surrendering rights that you did not intend to give up. Ideally, you should always consult with an attorney before making any changes to your license to ensure that it is valid and will hold up in court if needed.

Conclusions

Though Creative Commons provides a wide range of licenses for content creators to choose from, there will always be some who are not satisfied with the the choices they have and want more control.

For those, iCopyright may be a compelling option.

Though the system needs updates and changes before it can be truly customizable for copyright holders, it is already a huge step forward.

While this doesn’t prevent me from keeying a wish-list of new features, including editable titles, customizable attribution and more, it is clear to me that iCopyright is, for the most part, well on the right track.

Over the course of the three-day event, I met with many of the brightest minds in plagiarism fighting and heard talks that both inspired and educated in the fields of academic and artistic honesty.

Rather than simply provide a brief overview of what I saw and experienced. I’ve decided to go over it in more detail and provide a slightly more thorough overview of the goings on, as I experienced them.

Monday, June 23rd

The only big event on Monday was a user group for Turnitin in the early evening. However, it was a very busy two-hour session with three different speakers including Adrian Slater, a UK-based attorney who was very gentle on me with my understanding of UK copyright law, myself and John Barrie, the CEO and one of the founders of iParadigms, the makers of Turnitin.

First, Will Murray and Gill Rowell, both of whom represented Northumbria Learning and were organizers of the event, spoke about recent events and changes at their institution, including the creation of plagiarismadvice.org, their new resource site.

Slater focused on legal issues that surround targeting different groups of users. The dialog was interesting especially as it pertained to the handling of international students and singling them out for plagiarism detection.

After Slater, I gave a shortened version of my talk on protecting your content on the Web, a video that will be posted shortly, and then John Barrie gave a very good talk his vision for Turnitin and where he felt the product fit into the educator’s toolkit. Specifically, he wanted to see it move beyond a “plagiarism cop” and become part of a larger solution to make grading and assignments better.

After the sessions, we were invited to an hour-long walking tour of historic Newcastle, on which many of the images below were taken.

Tuesday, June 24th

The first full day of the conference, it started with a welcome address by Dr. Malcom Read of JISC and Jude Carroll of Oxford Brookes University. It was a great introduction to the conference and the theme of this year’s event and it, in turn, launched the audience into the first keynote.

Keynote 1: “R U 4 Reel”

Dr. John Lesko, the editor of Plagiary, a scholarly journal on the topic of plagiarism, and the Webmaster of Famous Plagiarists, gave the first keynote entitled “R U 4 Reel”.

The keynote was somewhat philosophical, talking about why plagiarism is such an offense and the importance of verifying the discourse by ensure that one is using their own words when conveying information. With so many philosophical conversations about how plagiarism is impossible or doesn’t exist, it was nice to see the other side of the coin so eloquently presented.

Also, he talked at length about plagiarism as senseless mimicking and why the the behavior had to be battled in order to encourage students to show what they had learned and help their instructors.

It was a great talk all around and a perfect intro into the rest of the conference.

Parallel Session 1: “Essays for Sale: Time for Legal Regulation?”

For the first workshop, I attended was entitled “Essays for Sale: Time for Legal Regulation?” and was put on by Martin Jones (Many thanks for the help remembering “M. Jones”!).

The talk went a slightly different direction than I thought it would. Rather than discussing should such essay sites be regulated, the talk analyzed if it was practical.

The end conclusion was that any attempt to use current laws to regulate essay sites would be a very difficult stretch and likely to fail. In the end, it got me thinking about other avenues of legal attack against plagiarists other than pure copyright issues so I’ll have much to discuss from this workshop later.

Workshops

This was my session so I have very little to say other than it went well and my sincere thanks to those who attended!

Keynote 2: “Maintaining confidence: honesty and authenticity in examinations”

The second keynote was by Isabel Nisbet of Ofqual. It was a research-intensive talk that dealt with current levels of student cheating, the difficult of getting reliable numbers on that subject and how such dishonesty can impact integrity of the entire education system.

It was insightful to get a glimpse at the current realities of how students view plagiarism and it made me wonder how much of this problem will seep onto the larger Web. Also, it was interesting to see just how conflicting some of the research is.

Parallel Session 2: “On the utility of plagiarism detection software”

For this workshop, I joined long-time friend Dr. Deborah Weber-Wulff of the FHTW Berlin and the the Copy, Shake and Paste blog. Many on this site may remember her from when iParadigms accused iPlagiarismCheck of abusing their service to run their own.

Her talk was relatively familiar to many as she went back over her results from her tests of various plagiarism detection systems.

The more exciting announcement was that she is going to expand and repeat her tests in September of this year, something I know many will look forward to the results of. I am also looking forward to assisting with this testing any way that I can.

Parallel Session 3: “Why students cheat (in their own words as well as those of others)”

For the third workshop, I attended a session put on by, Smith, H. & Ridgway, J entitled “Why students cheat (in their own words as well as those of others)”.

The talk focused heavily on face-to-face interviews with students as they explained their attitudes on cheating, especially plagiarism. It was a unique viewpoint that got behind the numbers of plagiarism and provided some insight on the mentality of students who do engage in dishonesty.

Another great talk with some very important statistics behind it.

Parallel Session 4

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the final workshop of the day. Both options were targeted at Turnitin users and we, Crystal and I, needed to get back to the hotel to prepare for the dinner that night. So, with permission from the organizers, we ducked out a bit early to go get ready.

Dinner

The dinner that night was at an eclectic restaurant in Newcastle entitled “As You Like It” It was a great dinner with lots of great non-plagiarism-related conversation. I think, more than anything, it was the international highlight of the event, with people across the globe getting together for some food, wine and laughter.

Wednesday, June 25th

Everyone came back for the final day tired (and in some cases a big hung over) from the dinner the previous night. However, things got off to an early start with the Sponsor’s Address.

Sponsor’s Address

John Barrie spoke for the second time, addressing many of the points as he did in his first talk. By pointing to some of the new tools iParadigms was releasing and his own personal vision, he pushed the use of Turnitin as a more holistic approach to improving the academic climate and encouraged teachers to avoid using the tool in a way that encouraged divisions between instructors and students.

It was another great talk by John, who despite the jet lag did two great presentations.

Keynote 3: “Examination of changes in the use of digital technologies for the monitoring of academic integrity issues at University level”

The third keynote, presented by Dr. Garry Allan of the Royal Melbourne INstitute of Technology in Australia was entitled “Examination of changes in the use of digital technologies for the monitoring of academic integrity issues at University level”.

The talk focused heavily on the need to focus on evidence-based writing in colleges and about how most college essay writing has little to do with what a student is asked to do in the work force.

I had several opportunities to talk with Dr. Allan over the course of the five days I was in the UK and his perspective about changing the assignment structure was very different from many at the conference but very refreshing at the same time.

Parallel Session 5: “An Approach to Detecting Article Spinning”

The session I attended was entitled “An Approach to Detecting Article Spinning” and was presented by Mr. James Malcom of the University of Hertfordshire.

This was easily one of my favorite talks as it dealt with many of the same technologies I wrestle with every day here at Plagiarism Today when dealing with spammers. Specifically, it dealt with tools that try to avoid duplicate content detection, either by Google or more traditional plagiarism detection applications, by replacing synonyms for various words.

His conclusion was that Turnitin and similar systems did a reasonable job of detecting such spinning but that his own creation, Ferret, does a slightly better job. However, he admits that it currently can not search the Web, something another version will be able to do soon.

It was a great talk that gave me a great deal of ideas and topics for later.

Parallel Session 6

I unfortunately missed this section as well. I had to take care of some personal items to prepare for a very early departure the next morning and was not able to attend any of the sessions during this block. I did return for lunch and the next keynote.

Keynote 4: “Disruptive Scholarship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Re)Use, (Re)Mix, (Re)New”

Eccentric is perhaps the only word to describe Gerry McKliernan. He is an unusual character that stands out even amongst a cast of unusual characters (Needless to say, he and I got along great). However, his keynote, entitled “Disruptive Scholarship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Re)Use, (Re)Mix, (Re)New” was the last keynote of the event and stood out as the most forward-thinking of them all.

The talk focused heavily on Web 2.0 technologies such as Wikis and the idea of collaborative scholarship. The talk was inspirational in nature and pulled many references from the local history, especially the Roman efforts to wall in the city to protect it from invaders from the north.

For those who are very familiar with Web 2.0 it might have been a bit fundamental but it was a very powerful message for a room that desperately needed to hear it.

Panel Discussion: “Are online essay sites exploiting students?”

This was by far the most anticipated event of the conference. It seemed that, ever since I touched down in Newcastle, that others were whispering about this event.

It was a 2 v 2 panel discussion dealing with essay sites and their role in academia. However, one of the panelists was Barclay Littlewood, operator of one of the major UK essay sites.

It seemed prepared to be a knock-down-drag-out intellectual steel cage death match in the making. Littlewood was prepared to defend himself and his site in front of the most hostile crowd imaginable. There was even some controversy among the conference-goers as some felt that it was inappropriate to give him a platform at all.

However, the street fight of the minds never took place. Littlewood, at the last minute, backed out and was unable to attend. He instead sent his opinion in the form of a paper, which was read in by the chair of the debate. However, since he clearly did not share Littlewood’s viewpoints, the arguments came off as weak and watered-down. Still, it was the best that he could do under the circumstances and more than I would have expected anyone to do for me if I could not attend a debate.

The result was the the other speaker in favor of essay sites, despite making many excellent points, seemed hopelessly outnumbered. Though he managed to paint essay sites as a market response, as natural as gravity, to problems within the education system, without an ally, he seemed to be drowned out.

In the end, it was yet another highlight for the conference for me, despite the limitations, and that is owed to the very creative presentations all three provided.

Personally, my pull away from it was this: While there are clearly issues with the current education system when it comes to evaluating students, the ends do not justify the means when it comes to essay sites.

Closing Address

Short, sweet and perfect. Will Murray, one of the organizers, gave the talk and it only lasted about ten minutes. Letting everyone out a little bit early and giving us all time to say goodbye. He wrapped things up nicely and net everyone out at a good time.

Personal Thoughts

Overall, I would say that this was easily one of the best put together conferences I have ever attended, bar none. The organizers of this event were great, everyone was very polite and helpful and the event went off without any major snags. You quite literally can not ask for a better conference.

If I were going to offer criticism, it would be of the technology. The main hall had no outlets for laptops, very frustrating to me personally as we had formed an EeePC fan club in the stands, and the wifi was a bit dodgy. It didn’t work reliably and required two logins to gain access.

However, those are minor issues at worst. I deeply enjoyed the conference and I am already writing my paper for the 2010 one.

With luck, I will be in Newcastle again soon…

Special Thanks

I want to quickly offer a very special thanks the the organizers of the conference, especially Will, his wife Helen and Gill, all of whom not only put on an incredible conference but made both me and Crystal feel incredibly welcome in England.

Also, I want to say thank you to all of those who attended the event for the great conversations, food for thought and even a few laughs. My memories of you will always be cherished.

Finally, an especially big thanks to all of the locals of Newcastle. You are, without a doubt, the friendliest people I have met in my travels. You know how to make an outsider feel welcome.

Gallery

Finally, for those who enjoy vacation slides, here are the photos we took on the trip. We, sadly, did not get a lot of the conference because most of the time was spent listening to speakers and we didn’t want to interrupt their talks. However, you can get a great taste of Newcastle within these images.

photo credit: tiagonicastro

Mikey, a contributor at Rusty Lime, recently posted a very interesting idea for deterring content theft or at least frustrating those who would lift your articles.

The basic premise is to use CSS trickery to ensure that would-be plagiarists pick up an image or a block of text, one that most likely denounces the theft or provides a link back to the original site, even though readers of the original site see nothing at all.

It’s a simple idea that that could deter or mitigate against content theft issues and may help some Webmasters add an extra layer of protection against such misuse.

However, as simple as the system is, it does have a critical flaw that greatly limits its usefulness, especially for bloggers.

The Premise

The actual idea behind the technique is strikingly simple.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can instruct Web browsers how to display a certain item on a page. Whether it is an image, a block of text or something else altogether, CSS can be used to determine the position, size and other variables of it.

However, CSS can also be used to completely hide an element, by simply adding the following line to your site’s CSS file and changing the class name to whatever you desired.

.hiddenclass { display:none; }

From then on, anything you want to hide from your visitors, you simply add the class name to the appropriate tag. For example, to hide an image, you might use this code.

<img class="hiddenclass" src="http://www.yoursite.com/hiddenimage.jpg" alt="" />

This will keep the visitors on your site from seeing the content but, should anyone scrape the HTML code, they will not have matching CSS code on their site, causing the image or text to appear.

Theoretically, this can be used to provide attribution to your own site only on pages that misuse the content. It is a potentially great way to punish spammers without putting any burden on legitimate users.

However, there is an issue with the technique that could make it impractical for many sites.

Fly in the Ointment

As exciting as the idea is, the problem is with publishing via RSS feed. The issue is that RSS readers do not have the ability to interpret CSS and, as such, anyone viewing the content over the feed would see the “hidden” content as well.

One could remove the hidden content from the RSS feed, but that would make the technique useless against RSS scraping, which is the most common form of unwanted republication taking place.

This means that, anything you place in the hidden content needs to be something that can comfortably be displayed in the RSS feed as well. meaning that it is something users of the site will continue to see whatever you are trying to hide.

This prohibits you from using strong content theft warnings and other devices that might be tempting to use.

Illustrating the Problem

To help illustrate this point. I’ve added a special class to my site’s CSS file that will hide certain images. Below, I’m going to display the Plagiarism Today logo twice, first without and second with the CSS class.

Begin Visible

End Visible

Begin “Hidden”

End “Hidden”

If you are viewing this article actually on the site itself, the second image will be hidden and nothing will appear between teh two lines. However, if you are reading it on the RSS feed, you should see the image twice.

This is a recurring problem for me on this site as I use CSS attributes to position the inline images on the site but have to continue to add other code to ensure that they display right when viewed in RSS readers.

Either way, please leave a comment on your experience with this test, what RSS reader you are using and what the outcome was.

Conclusions

There are potential uses for this system. It could be especially useful in environments where you can edit CSS files but not add plugins or otherwise manipulate the RSS feed. It may also help with situations where HTML scraping is a bigger concern than RSS scraping.

For most, this technique will not be very useful but it is still a clever idea that might help some Webmasters better protect their content.

Even though it won’t do anything to actually stop the plagiarist or other rip off artist from using the work, it can mitigate against the damage that they do and add a little bit of frustration to the lives of a plagiarist.

Of course, until RSS feed get better support for CSS, this solution will always be an incomplete one. However, it still is a trick worth keeping in mind, if nothing else in case it becomes useful some day down the road.

However, one factor that I had not actively considered, but has come up in recent conversations, was if the service you used could help draw more attention to your site.

Specifically at issue is if using a free blog host, such as WordPress.com, BlogSpot or LiveJournal could draw attention to spammers that specifically targeted those sites. I have seen a handful of spam blog networks that seem to target one blog host specifically, but these occurrences have been seemingly rare.

I would like to get feedback on this issue to see if it is something I should look into more deeply. I would love feedback from those who run both self-hosted and freely-hosted blogs and their experiences with scraping on both.

It would seem logical to me that they would be greater targets for scraping given that it is known freely hosted bloggers have fewer tools for stopping RSS abuse and lack the server control to block scrapers. However, freely hosted blogs would also seem to be less reliable considering there is no penalty for bloggers walking away.

If this seems to be a factor I’ll plan on looking into it more deeply and seeing which services are most at risk and what can be done about it.

I look forward to your thoughts.

However, in this case, the backdating was unlikely to fool anyone. The date shifting was so severe, usually spanning several weeks, that many of the entries on the spam blog were listed as posted before the events they described and, most likely, were allegedly posted on dates well before the search engine spiders made their last visits.

Still, it is not uncommon to see spam bloggers backdate their scraped posts more conservatively. From a shift of a few hours to account for time zone differences to a day or two to try and appear more legitimate, there are many reasons why a spammer’s post may appear to go up before your own.

Fortunately though, this is not a major worry for Webmasters. The timestamps we look at are all lies and both search engines and users know that to be the case.

Why Timestamps Lie

The problem with the timestamps provided by most major blogging platforms is that they are easily changed by users. There are many legitimate reasons why a blogger or Webmaster would want to alter a timestamp. You can forward date a post so that it publishes in your absence, pre-date the post so that it fits into a natural series with related items or set the date to an outlandish time so that it remains at the top of the page.

Even if there is no intentional manipulation of the timestamp by the author, it can still be wrong due to problems with the server, disagreements in time zone and other completely natural issues that can change the date a post or page is listed as going up.

For these reasons, search engines place very little faith in the timestamp of a post when determining which is the original. As such, spammers are unable to simply backdate their scraped posts and claimed the top spot in Google.

Fortunately, it is a bit more difficult that that.

It’s About Trust

If spammers could steal search engine thunder by simply backdating their posts, every spammer would be doing it. However, search engines place much more stock in how much trust the sites involve have and that is something much more difficult to obtain.

This is something that Andy Beard points out on his site. In a recent post on his blog, he responded to a previous post by David Naylor, using many of the same keywords. Though Beard’s post both came later and linked to Naylor’s post in the first paragraph, Beard’s site was able to claim the top spot in Google for a relative search term due solely to its search engine authority.

Though the story is anecdotal in nature, it illustrates how Google, and other search engines, award rankings. It is not based merely upon who is first, but rather, who is it trusts more and which site the search engines feels the reader would rather land on.

This makes backdating posts an ineffective tactic for gaining search engine ranking. If Google does not trust your site, it does not matter if your post appears to have come first or even if it truly did, you will not rank well for terms related to it.

While this is good news for many bloggers who are heavily scraped, there are other bloggers that have a great deal to worry about.

Spammer Trust

On the upside, if your site is well-established and is generally trusted by the search engines, it has a natural shield against scraping. Search engines are not likely to give a new site more authority than you on a topic, regardless of how they date their posts.

However, statistically speaking, most active blogs are fairly new and have not yet earned that level of authority. As such, they may be very vulnerable to scraping, especially considering that spam bloggers often leverage their networks to build up artificial authority. In the early months of a blog’s life, it is entirely likely that the spammers scraping its posts may have more authority and trust than the original posts, making it very hard for the site to find its footing.

In short, the problem with authority is that all sites start out with none and that makes them vulnerable to abuse from sites that have any, no matter how little.

Conclusions

Bloggers have very little to worry about from “clever” spammers that backdate their posts. The search engines place little to no faith in those timestamps and, most likely human readers don’t either.

The issue is not who came first, but who carries more trust. The Associated Press, for example, will always carry more trust than a one-month old blog and the fact that the blog backdates its posts is irrelevant.

In short, it is more important to cull and nurture this kind of relationship than it is to simply be first. This is not just a large part of what prevents spam bloggers from simply taking over the Web, but also part of the reason why new bloggers often struggle with scraping so much more severely than established.

It is very important to track and stop blog scraping, especially in the early months of a blog’s life, to further that trust and ensure that the spammers can not build an artificial reputation.

After all, the sword cuts both ways. If being first will not help the spammers, it will not help you either. Building and maintaining your authority level is the first and best step to protecting yourself against scraping, but it is one that requires both hard work on building your content and vigilance at keeping the spammers at bay.

It details steps that users of Automattic’s hosted blog solution can take to monitor and prevent misuse of their work. It’s a guide tailored to the more limited tools available to WordPress.com users.

The article offers several tips on how WordPress.com users, working in their limited environment, can get functionality similar to the plugins self-hosted WordPress users have at their disposal.

I hope that users of WordPress.com find the guide useful and please feel free to add anything that I missed to the comments in the original article. I plan on doing other guides in the future for other sites such as BlogSpot and Typepad if there is a great deal of interest.

However, forum spam has typically shared the most in common with blog comment spam. A few junk links mixed with some garbled text in a bid to create a search engine pump. Although such spam has been the bane of forum admins, it has been relatively easy to control and has raised few issues for content creators.

But a new twist on forum spam changes that game. Spammers have begun to use forums much like spam blogs, using them as a tool for posting scraped content, rather than just garbage links.

This brings a whole new series of challenges to both forum admins and copyright holders as they both seek to keep the Web clean of spam content and plagiarized works.

Why Forums

Spammers are naturally drawn to forums for a lot of reasons. Consider the following:

1. Open Registration: Anyone can set up an account at most forums and the process of doing so can be easily automated at many locations since most forums use one of a handful forum applications, many of which have weak signup protections.


2. High Trust: Forums generally have a high level of trust with search engines and are very search-engine friendly in most cases. Many forums carry a high PageRank and can provide an excellent platform for spammers to build search engine ranking.


3. NoFollow: Unlike blog comments, which are almost always “nofollowed”, the linking policy for each forum is different. Many, however, do not nofollow links contained in the post itself.
   
4. Overworked Admins: If spam is able to get through the automated protections, it may be quite some time before an admin or a moderator is able to remove it. Active forums have many times more posts than most blogs have comments and most forum admins do not receive email alerts for every new post.


5. Low-Hanging Fruit: In addition to active and trusted forums, there are countless inactive ones that still have a Web presence. The forum admins may never remove spam on those, making them ripe targets for spammers, despite the lack of trust and updates.

However, these reasons for targeting forums are well-known and have been around for some time. Forum admins took an interest in stopping spam well before most bloggers did and have tools in place to try and block it.

But while many of those protections have been cracked, most well-maintained forums are relatively free from spam, the same as most well-maintained blogs.

But a new wave of spam may be changing that and very soon.

Forum Spam Redux

As is typical with the games of cat and mouse, spammers have escalated their attacks on forums and are working harder to blend in with legitimate users.

One of the techniques they are using is the scraping, or mere hand-copying, of articles and posting them to related forums. However, the use of the work is, for the most part, unattributed and often times the links contained within the article are altered to point to the spam sites.

Other times, spammers simply create profiles, post seemingly legitimate but otherwise junk content, usually by copying other sources, and bury the spam links in their user information.

Both of these techniques closely mirror the activities of legitimate users and, since many forums take a lenient attitude toward copyright infringement by itself, forum admins are often slow to take action against such spammers as they rarely spot them.

It is not uncommon to see cases where a spammer has posted a scraped article, loaded it with junk links, and has received replies from regular members, further validating the post.

Content creators, however, suffer from this. While they might not be opposed to the copying and reposting of their work on the forum, the unattributed use practically guarantees that, in many cases, the forum will rank higher in the search engines and their own site will suffer.

The forum itself will also suffer, potentially having to face copyright complaints from angry Webmasters and dealing with potential Google spam blocks that could make it harder for them to be ranked in the long term.

It is in the best interest of forum admins and content creators alike that these spammers be thwarted.

What Forum Admins Can Do

Forum admins already have their hands full and this new spam attack is not going to make things any easier. However, there are some things that they can do to help not only themselves, but their community and content creators.

1. Be Available: A good general rule for forum admins is to be available for anyone who visits your forum to make complaints, point out spam or otherwise raise issues. This means having an email address on the public-facing portion of your site so non-members can contact you as easily as your users.


2. Don’t Tolerate Copyright Infringement: Don’t wait for others to file copyright infringement complaints. If a users republishes an article or is clearly copying and posting whole works in posts, truncate the post and link to the source. Make this part of your policy. Forums rely on original content and good discussions, wholesale copying is not necessary for that.


3. Investigate Questionable Users: If a user does infringe, especially if they do so more than once, take a closer look at them including their profile links. Make sure they are not trying to spam the forum discreetly.


4. Nofollow Links: If your software has the ability to nofollow links in posts, it is likely a good idea to do so, especially with new users or users that have not earned a great deal of trust.


5. Update Spam Protection: Keep on top of your regular spam protection tools and keep your countermeasures up to date. Like most of these items, it is a good idea in general but is especially important as spammers continue to crack CAPTCHAs and other torture tests.

In short, these are good steps that all forum admins should take, regardless of whether they are currently spam targets or not. Though the problem seems to be currently isolated to technology forums (video games, computers, cell phones, etc.), some gambling forums and adult communities, it is only a matter of time before it spreads.

That is, if it hasn’t already.

Conclusions

In the end, this is just another escalation in the war between administrators and spammers, but this escalation has some potentially drastic consequences for bloggers, journalists and other content creators.

It is important that this trend be watched closely to see if it continues or if it fizzles out and goes nowhere.

However, given the nature of spammers to constantly try different techniques, it seems unlikely that they will retreat from a method if it has been shown to have any success.

Rather, they will just add on other techniques and further expand their operations.