The Next Big Dotcom
Computers have made us love reports. Data is actually fun these days, and the dark ages image of pages and pages of black and white numerical lists in tiny tiny fonts is long gone. So the next big thing in marvelously useful webbased applications is likely to be something called Attributor. TechCrunch.com has a nice summary of its features.
The basic idea is a service that you can ask to track your content for usages all across the internet, kind of a spy/detective type of thing.
But it doesn’t just find them so that you can look and see what’s going on. It actually analyzes the ways in which your content is being used - you get reports on the amount being used, whether or not it is attributed to you, whether or not there is a link to your original source, and mostly importantly and refreshingly new, it will tell you whether your content is being used on ad supported sites or not.
The idea behind all this is to let people track potential copyright infringements in an intelligent way, so that they can concentrate on infringements that are actually or potentially harmful. But it could also be used by musicians and other independent creators who want to track the dissemination of their freely supplied content.
Although the service is exciting, I called it the next big thing because it’s not fully functional yet. Text is currently the only type of content that can be tracked, although the company is working on methods to track other content. If the technology is up to the task, I believe Attributor will be as big a deal as myspace, facebook, youtube, and even google.
link of the day - a reminder that the internet is not the only place to browse: http://www.thebookstacks.com/welcome-to-the-library/
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