Attributor Corp. announced a collaboration with Creative Commons today to offer a free service to anyone wishing to track their content on-line. The service is called FairShare. Provide FairShare with an RSS feed of your content and the service will compare it to billions of indexed pages around the web.
Once FairShare has the content, it creates a custom RSS feed that delivers a running list of site links where the licensed content may be found. Each result contains a link to a FairShare page that has more information and a stored capture of the Web page in question. The collaboration with Creative Commons comes in when FairShare attempts to determine whether sites reusing your content are respecting the terms you’ve set in your Creative Commons license. For example, ads on the page violate conditions for one type of CC license, non-commercial reuse only.
The FairShare system was developed to help content creators discover all the ways their works were being used on the Internet. By automatically monitoring for re-use, authors get a better idea of who is taking inspiration from their works. This works well, but we would like to be able to pull up more detail on each site, for example WHOIS information.
FairShare is launching in beta today and is accepting new RSS feeds from anyone. If you have your own feed, go ahead and give it a try. You might be surprised (even pleasantly) by where your words appear and in what context.
