Can Google Alerts Protect Your Blog Posts?
May 17th 2007 19:42
I'm in the process of conducting an experiment to see whether Google Alerts can help us bloggers detect unauthorized use of our blog posts--and, so far, it seems to be working. No, I haven't found someone using one of my blog posts without my permission; but Google did find one of my posts (on my own blog), after I'd entered an identifying phrase from the post into the "Search Terms" field. [I'd entered the search string (in quotation marks): "surviving and thriving in the freelance writing world," from my May 14th post, "More Great Sites for Writing Moms"--and Google Alerts found the string inside of about five minutes! (Of course, I had set up an "as-it-happens" alert.)]
Obviously, for this to work, you would need to use a very unique phrase--one which isn't likely to be used by other (or many other) writers. Otherwise, you would defeat your purpose, ending up with a bunch of alerts that have nothing to do with your own writing! I've also tried using titles of a few of my posts, but haven't gotten any results, yet; though I'm not sure how helpful that would be, anyway, since someone who wanted to steal your post, would likely remove the title.
I figure that, at the very least, this will encourage us to be creative in our phraseology, to avoid using too many time-worn cliches, to come up with new and unique ways of saying things, and to wax eloquent through using language in ways that are uniquely our own--all of which can only improve our writing! And after all, isn't that what being a writer is all about?
I'm still in the middle of this experiment, so haven't got any conclusive results yet; but I figure that anything we can do to protect our work--even if it doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time--will be helpful in those instances where it does work. Don't you agree?
Jeanne
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