I will be joined by a variety a slew of heavy-hitters in the tech field as they talk about everything from why video games suck to cyberwarfare.

As usual when I attend such an event, I’ll be reporting on it live, tweeting out notes and images over my Twitter account so feel free to follow along with the action there.

Also, as usual, with permission from the conference organizers, I will be posting the slides of my presentation online for everyone and licensing it under a Creative Commons License. So, expect that sometime either later this week or early next.

In other site news, I will also be resuming the 3 Count column tomorrow and will be keeping limited office hours during the down times.

Finally, if any of you are in the Phoenix area and want to meet, drop me a line. I’ve already gotten to meet long-time friend and former Copyright 2.0 Show co-host Chris Matthieu and am hoping to meet a few others while I’m here.

I hope to see some of you at the TechForum and will be keeping everyone up to date on my Twitter account.

As most of you probably know, I was in Dallas this past weekend for OpenCamp 2010, the successor to Wordcamp Dallas 2008 and 2009. The idea behind the conference was to open WordCamp to other blogging platforms, namely Drupal, Joomla and .net, and bring everyone together as bloggers rather than users of a specific CMS.

I also gave a talk at the event, a 30-minute session as part of the WordPress track on how to share your work on the Web without hurting your copyright. The focus of the talk was how to let legitimate users use your content without letting plagiarists, spammers and others just run away with it.

During the talk, I highlighted Creative Commons licensing as well as three services that are making traditional blog content, including text and images, easier to share with attribution. They included Embed Anything (previous coverage), Clp.ly (previous coverage) and Tynt (previous coverage).

All in all, everything went very well. The conference started an hour late due to some technical difficulties but ran smoothly after that. None of the tracks seemed to fall behind and the organizers did a great job moving the entire event along. My talk seemed to be well-received with lots of good questions both in the session and afterward.

The best part, however, was meeting up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in over a year and hanging out a bit. Late night dinners with Aaron Brazell, Ronald Huereca, Doug Vann and Mike Potter were great. Also seeing old buddies like Lorelle VanFossen, Dave Moyer, Kat Rice, Rob Holmes and Jeff Guin (who was nice enough to put up with us for the last 4.5 hours of the drive up there) among countless others was wonderful.

All in all, it was a great conference and a great time. I met a lot of new people got back together with some old friends and stayed out way past my bed time the entire trip (running on about 10 hours of sleep across the three nights).

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers and volunteers of this event including John P, Cali Lewis, Matthew McGarity, Mark Ramsey and Jennifer Conley to name just a few. Their hard work really showed off.

Also, as an open invitation to the people I met, please feel free to add me on Facebook and stay in touch.

I’ve embedded my slides from my presentation below and hope to have the video from the talk up soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

Thank you again to everyone for making the conference so great and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Photos

If you are interested in photos from the conference, I’ve created a gallery on Facebook for my images that is public for all. Please forgive the poor photo quality as they were taken in tough lighting with an old iPhone (that needs a proper burial). Crystal had the good camera and was being artistic with it.

Presentation Slides

I know I’m a few days late with this, I missed it on the 17th when the Panel Picker went online, but I am on a proposed panel entitled “Preventing Legal Pitfalls Online“.

The panel is being organized by Katherine Sunstrom, a Houston intellectual property attorney.

The other panelists on board are myself, a plagiarism and copyright consultant and manager of CopyByte.com, Charles Lee Mudd Jr., a Chicago attorney that has represented individuals sued and subpoenaed by the RIAA and Christine Tremoulet a photographer who specializes in wedding and boudoir photography.

The panel will specifically look at ten questions:

1. What do I do if I receive a cease and desist letter?
2. Do I need to register my works if I am distributing under a creative commons license?
3. What are the myths about use of copyright online?
4. Why register my work?
5. How can I find out if someone is copying my content?
6. How do I prevent others from copying my content?
7. Should I take comfort in the concept of fair use?
8. Do I need a copyright notice and what should it look like?
9. How do I protect my copyright interests without being seen as “copywrong”?
10. Should I really worry about the possibility of others using my intellectual property, what is the harm?

It is an intermediate-level panel that should be approachable by laypeople and attorneys alike.

If you’re interested in this panel, I would like to encourage you to vote for it and leave comments supporting it. Between the four of us you have some great copyright and creative minds that approach this issue from many different perspectives. I would be very excited about this panel even if I were not on it.

So, if you have a moment, I’d greatly appreciate a quick thumbs up for the panel. Also, if you don’t plan on attending SXSW in 2010, remember that the panel will, very likely, be available via video afterward for everyone to enjoy.

For the record, SXSW will be happening March 12-21 2010 and the Interactive Conference will be March 12-16. I’ll be attending no matter what so please come out and see me!

Though I recognize that most of the readers of this site as Webmasters eager to protect their content, I also know that more than a few developers of plagiarism detection tools read this blog. For them, I wanted to do a quick post about about the upcoming Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009 conference, which is hosting a PAN workshop on plagiarism analysis, authorship identification and “social software misuse”.

As part of this PAN workshop, Yahoo! research is hosting what it is calling the 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection, which it hopes to make an annual event.

The competition pits plagiarism detection systems against one another to test their accuracy and completeness.

Specifically, there are two tasks:

1. External Plagiarism Analysis: This task provides contestants with suspect documents and source documents and requires the system to find the plagiarized passages.
2. Intrinsic Plagiarism Analysis: This task requires contestants to detect plagiarized passages WITHOUT comparison to outside documents, for example, by detecting shifts in writing style.

The competition is providing the documents to be tested, estimated to be at 20,000 source and 20,000 suspect documents of various sizes with various amounts and kinds of plagiarism. The documents are primarily in English and the plagiarism has been “perpetrated” by a software application that randomizes the the amount plagiarized, the obfuscation and even, in some cases, translation.

The competition is open to commercial plagiarism checkers but requires that submissions be provided in a set XML format to make it easier for them to process the output (due to the large volume of plagiarism). This may mean that some services have to “hack” their output to fit the standards of the competition.

The winning product receives 500 Euros and submissions are being accepted until June 7th, 2009. Please see the link above for the specific rules.

This is not the first time a broard-array of plagiarism detection suites have been put to the test. In November of last year, Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, announced the results of her second round of testing and gave the top prize to Copyscape.

I’ve been keeping a pretty tame conference schedule this hear after the whirlwind that was last year’s. However, I am starting to work on a few appearances and am proud to announce my first one of 2009, at the Online International Virtual Assistants Conference (OIVAC).

OIVAC is an online conference, meaning that no travel is necessary, and I will be speaking at 4 PM EDT on May 15. My talk is entitled “Dealing with Plagiarism: A Realistic Guide to Fighting Content Theft” and is a broad overview of how to protect, track and stop misuse of your work on the Web.

I actually gave a similar talk at the OIVAC last year but this one will be heavily updated to reflect new technologies and techniques. Last year’s talk went extremely well, with some great questions, so I am very happy to be coming back.

Registration for the event ranges depending on the number of seminars you wish to attend. One seminar costs $25 while a 3-day pass to all of the events costs $350.

If you are a VA, this conference is a must-attend (even if you don’t go to my talk). If you’re not but might be interested in seeing my presentation, feel free to register and pop on in. Honestly, most veteran PT readers probably know most of what is in the presentation already but, if you’re new to the site, it might double as a good introduction.

I will also post a link to the presentation and a recording of it when it goes live after the conference.

I will be attending and speaking at the European Journalism Centre’s Innovation Journalism event entitled “Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons”. I’ll be giving a talk about plagiarism and how it ties in with the CC movement and Web journalism. The talk will be recorded and a video will be available after it is done.

I’ll be returning to the states on Sunday and should be back to normal next week for the most part, though there will not be an episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show on Monday.

In the meantime, I plan on posting updates, pictures and whatever else comes up on my Twitter account as wifi access, battery life, etc. allow. If you’re interested in the part of the country I’ll be in, the Wikipedia entry actually has some great pictures and information.

I look forward to heading out and I will resume normal posting next week! Thank you all for your patience.

I’m very excited about the trip and looking forward to meeting a lot of you there. I know several long-time PT readers will be attending so this is going to be a very big trip for me.

As a result, I won’t be around Thursday or Friday but I will be back Saturday in the morning. I should be able to do the linkroll as usual on Saturday and record the Copyright 2.0 Show on Sunday (I originally thought I was returning later but am glad that is not the case).

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to follow me on Twitter as I will be liveblogging the event (the best that wifi and battery life will allow) and should have regular updates there.

I’m looking forward to ConvergeSouth though I am definitely going to be glad when it is over. It should be my last conference for a while. Though I’ve enjoyed the traveling, I’m looking forward to spending a few months at home.

See you there and, if not, I’ll be back next week!

I am looking forward to attending the event this year and am very excited about this panel. Not only do I think it is a great topic needing more discussion, especially as social media becomes a bigger part of the Web, but I am also a planned speaker for it.

So, if you’re coming to SXSW and would like to see me speak or just want to see additional discussion on this issue, please take a moment to vote for the panel.

Click Here to Vote For This Panel

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.

For those who are interested in what is going on and want updates to the conference, I will be semi-liveblogging it via Twitter. If you are interested, you can subscribe to my Twitter account and get regular updates on the conference as well as pictures and video as time and technology allow.

I do have to caution that on this trip I will not have my cell phone. Since the phone will not work at all in the UK due to the network I am on, I am simply not going to bring it. Thus, that may limit the number of tweets I am able to send out. I will, however, have my EeePC and, hopefully, reliable Internet access. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else.

I will provide updates as regularly as I can and, no matter what, will provide a complete wrap-up on my return.

Hope to see some of you there!

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