There’s a website called Tynt that can help you, if not stop Internet theft, at least make those thieves think about what they’re doing.  And, for people who just like the information you have on your website or blog, Tynt’s service will help them keep track of where they got the information, and establish incoming links to your website, too!

I heard about Tynt from Mr. Internet, Michael Russer.  If you read Michael’s post, you can watch a short video explaining how Tynt works.

I tried adding the (at-least-for-now-free) Tynt code to our main site at BuildRealEstateResults.com.   Then, I copied a paragraph from one of the articles on that site to this post.  You can see what happened in between the 2 lines below:

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The point is that a brand is only represented by a logo. The mental image that comes to mind when thinking of a particular brand? It’s the result of a lot of hard work by the company to define their brand identity, and to burn that identity into the minds of their customers. 

Tynt automatically added the information starting with ”Read more” to the text I copied.

Now, this service won’t stop a determined Internet thief from stealing your content.  They can very easily delete the attribution that automatically appears after the content or image that has been copied.

However, for copies made by people who aren’t trying to build a website or blog by stealing the content from other places, this could be an interesting way to get some incoming links to your website or blog.

If someone copies something from you to go in an email, the email recipients may well follow the link back to your page.  If someone copies something and places in a public place such as a blog or Facebook page, that incoming link could help your SEO and bring more visitors to your site.

And, I would hope that when someone who just isn’t aware of the laws against Internet theft sees the link, they will leave it in place – or decide to write their own content!

There are some Tynt options.  Here are just some examples.  I chose to show the Creative Commons license which applies to my copyrighted material.  You can also connect Tynt to your Twitter account – anytime someone does a copy/paste from a protected site, it will show up on your Twitter account.

Tynt will also provide activity statistics.  You’ll notice that the URL referenced in the Tynt attribution has some coding after the .html for the page.  That coding allows Tynt to let me know things about what is being copied.

Just as an FYI, when I copied the Tynt-attributed text to this blog post, every paragraph I entered after that copy was placed in a <div> which eliminated the white space between paragraphs.  So, if I hadn’t really wanted to show that example, I might have given up on copying the information.  Tynt, if you’re listening, please tell your code to stop doing that!  Also, it would be nice if you could set up multiple websites in one account.  Right now, it looks like you need a new account for each one.

In any event, it’s an interesting capability to play with!

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