After taken a week and a bit break from blogging, social networking etc.. I thought it was time to jump back on the bandwagon and get things moving again. Before I started getting into the grind, I had a wee peak at Google Webmaster Tools where I noticed a number of links coming from a site called Shownar.

After a little bit of investigating it turns out that Shownar is the BBC’s experimental prototype to track buzz online about its shows.

At the moment, Shownar, is centered around the BBC’s iPlayer, but it is expected that, if it becomes popular enough, it will be the main site for taking the online pulse of shows from other TV networks including American.

Why was NSM featured, well it was this post : Top Sources For Online Related News where I mentioned the BBC’s technology program Click!

How does Shownar Work?
Basically by tracking inbound links to various programme-related pages on the bbc.co.uk. Shownar monitors Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online’s BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly).

Quite a few weeks ago I noticed the Daily Mail run a cheeky little script on its web copy that when you copied and pasted an excerpt from one of its articles you also included a link back to the page where it was lifted from, for example :

The dementia affecting hundreds of thousands of Britons may be a legacy of the Second World War, a scientist has claimed.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1213703/Dementia-caused-Second-World-War-claims-scientist.html#ixzz0RGlrjtMy

Now, this script is free and available from Tynt Tracer – www.tynt.com – you have to sign-up, but it is all done in a matter of seconds.

The dashboard shows the number of times paragraphs, words or images get lifted from your site, as below :

Go ahead, try it, copy any text from this site and paste it into notepad or your preferred WYSIWYG and see if the attribute link is copied with it.

Of course there are always ways around these things, most modern browsers you can turn javascript off and on in a few seconds and be away with all the copy you want from a site and Trynt Tracer, if it’s installed, will not have the foggiest that you’ve been. Also you can always just view the source code as well.

Anyways, i’m going to roll with it for a few weeks and see what information I can pick up about the users visiting this site, you never know I might even get a few attribution links generated in this time.

Also, I have another site that gets tons of traffic from Google’s image search that would be ideal for using Tynt Tracer on.