I found a link to PlagSpotter in the morning mail.
I found it quite responsive, although I thought the “Share and Help Your Friends Protect Their Web Content” rather limiting.
Here’s why:
To test the software, I choose a blog entry from another blog, one I quoted late yesterday, to test the timeliness of PlagSpotter.
And it worked!
While looking at the results, I saw people I expected to quote the same post, but then noticed there were people unknown to me on the list.
Rather than detecting plagiarism, the first off-label use of PlagSpotter is to identify communities quoting the same content.
With just a little more effort, the second off-label use of PlagSpotter is to track the spread of content across a community, by time. (With a little post processing, location, language as well.)
A third off-label use of PlagSpotter is to generate a list of sources that use the same content, a great seed list for a private search engine for a particular area/community.
The earliest identifiable discussion of topic maps as topic maps, involved detection of duplicated content (with duplicated charges for that content) for documentation in government contracts.
Perhaps why topic maps never gained much traction in government contracting. Cheats dislike being identified as cheats.
Ah, a fourth off-label use of PlagSpotter, detecting duplicated documentation submitted as part of weapon system or other documentation.
I find all four off-label uses of PlagSpotter more persuasive than protecting content.
Content only has value when other people use it, hopefully with attribution.