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Do you create great content on your blog that is useful to a lot of people?  Do you post beautiful photographs on your website?  Then you probably have a lot of people copying text and images from your blog to use elsewhere.  They may or may not attribute it back to your blog by adding a link.  

Tracer is a script designed to let you track this copied content and also provide all kinds of usage statistics for it.  Best of all it will add an automatic attribution link back to your post so that content you have created can result in traffic to you regardless of where it resides.  And to top it all it promises to let you do all this for free.  Definately a must have for all the content creators out there.  

Tracer is currently undergoing limited beta so there is a turnaround time from when you apply untill you get approved.  I received afast response with an email from the beta team within 24 hours asking for some basic information about the blog(s) I would be using Tracer on.  

The team then reviewed my website(they were nice enough to leave me a comment under this post) and I soon received another email with the appropriate code to install Tracer on my website as well as my log in credentials for the Tracer website.

Adding the code was really simple in wordpress: just click on the Appearance->Editor Menu in your Wordpress admin, click on the footer.php file to edit it and add the code above the </body> tag.  Click Update File to save changes. (You can use the same method for non wordpress websites – just add the script above the </body> tag.)

After I added the code, I went to the Tracer website, www.tynt.com, and logged in with the credentials sent to me by email.  

Once logged in, I clicked on the Settings/Script link on the top right,  entered my blog’s URL in the text box under ‘Test My Script’ and clicked ‘Test’.  (If you get the message as above, the script has been installed correctly.  I happened to check just after I installed the script and I got a test failed mesage but when I ran the test again after a few hours, it ran fine so I guess it takes some time to get configured.)

Tracer automatically adds a link to the source

I ran some tests to try out Tracer.  I copied text from a published post on this blog and copied it into a post in Recipe Mobile.  It automatically added an attribute link back to my bloo the source it was copied from in the new post (ofcourse this link and surrounding text could be edited).  This definately is beneficial to the original content creator and will save time for the publisher who is using their content.

Lastly after coping some more content off this website, I logged into my Tracer account and navigated to the dashboard.  It shows some nifty graphics using snapshots of the posts where content was copied including actual text.  It also shows other statisctics such as page views, user actions, number of copies (text and images), most used words etc.  All in all some very interesting information for any content creator.

Ill get back with a more comprehensive review once I get the chance to try out Tracer but I really hope it can deliver what it promises.

If you have had a chance to try out Tracer, please let me know your review.  Would you implement such an application?  What would be some other uses for it?  Are there any other applications that you are already using that provide the same functionality?  I appreciate your comments.

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