Copyright theft online isn’t just a problem for the music and software industries. Dupes of your content can hurt you not only in lost traffic and revenue… if you don’t take care to protect your content, you might even find the thieves’ versions ranking above your original content in search engine results.

That doesn’t happen often, but why risk letting thieves build a publishing history, and inbound links, with your content? Not when finding them is so easy.

The simplest way to check for duped content online is to plug your URLs into Copyscape. It’s a free search engine that takes the URL you supply it and does a nifty little content analysis to find duped pages on the Web. (If you want to pay a few bucks a month, they’ll check your pages for you, on a regular schedule, or let you construct automated searches via an API.)

I’ve used Copyscape to bust folks duping math tutorials I wrote a decade ago. Some academic colleagues have used TurnItIn, another service that checks for duped content online. TurnItIn is designed for use by teachers and professors, and aims to identify student work that’s been copied from the Web. Instead of starting with an original page and looking for dupes, TurnItIn takes a student paper then looks for similar work online.

Unlike Copyscape, TurnItIn doesn’t offer a free option, and requires a license to use. If you teach journalism, either as your full-time job or as a part-time gig, your school might have a license already, so it’s worth asking.

You can also use Google to track snippets of content from your website. Just find a unique phrase from a page, then search for it on Google, and see what turns up. This can help you find scrapers that are pulling excerpts from your site. If you have a handful of high-value webpages that you want to track against copying, for free, just set up Google Alerts for key phrases from those pages, and let Google inform you via e-mail when it finds other webpages that match them.

Let’s say you find some hits, either dupes of entire pages, or excerpts that take far more than could be considered fair use. What then?

The nicest response is to e-mail a note to the site, either using a contact form on the infringing website or a WHOIS search to find an address for the owner of the domain. Politely, but firmly, inform them of the violation and ask that they remove the content.

If you’re dealing with an eager reader or clueless novice publisher, this is by far the most effective approach and can provide what educators like to call a “teaching moment” about copyright law. Why bring out the legal guns against your fans? Just show ‘em how to hyperlink to the content they want to show others.

But if you are dealing with a professional scraper, the folks who are building businesses on stolen content online, then you’ll likely need to skip to the next step — filing a copyright infringement notice. Google explains how to do this on its website. It’s a relatively simple cut-and-paste job to create the complain letter, which will be need to be faxed or snail-mailed.

You might also file infringement notices with the offending publisher and its Internet host. But if you’re not in the mood to do the sleuthing necessary to find the name and mailing address of the publisher’s host, or if the host is located outside the U.S., filing with Google, and other search engines, will do the trick. After all, if no one can find the offending website via search engines, it’s as good as gone from the Web anyway.

Even if you are among the publishers using Creative Commons to allow others to republish your content online, you might still wish to use Copyscape or other methods to ensure that the people who are republishing your content are doing so under the Creative Commons conditions you requested.

Finally, don’t overlook the importance of publishing your e-mail address or a contact form on your site. What does this have to do with copyright protection? First, making it easy for readers to contact you can help prevent copyright infringement, as readers who are interested in passing your content along to others can get in touch with you to ask permission beforehand. I’ve found that this is a great way to thank readers for their interest, while steering them away from simply duplicating my content.

Second, a contact form or e-mail allows readers a way to alert you to infringements that they find. I’ve had this happen to me, too. Several readers, over the years, have let me know about websites that were duplicating the articles I’d written. These readers were fans, and were as outraged about someone else profiting from my work, as I was.

So social networks online can work for you, even as there is a risk that the informal tone many readers perceive online leads some of those readers to rip off and dupe up your content. Make tech tools work for you, though, and you can help ensure that your content is going out on the Web in the way you want it, and not in ways that you do not.

One of the big unexpected expenses that slams many new Web publishers is bandwidth. When you’re publishing on a freebie blogging service, you probably don’t need to worry about how many MB, or GB, of data your site is sending out to readers each day. But when you move up to your own Web domain, heavy traffic can mean expensive bandwidth charges.

Audio and video files hog bandwidth at exponentially greater rates than even the most image-laden static webpages. In my experience, one minute of a decent-quality interview in MP3 format runs up to about 1 MB. So if you have 200 listeners for a five-minute audio feature posted on your site, you are looking at an extra 1 GB of bandwidth just for that feature alone.

That adds up quickly, and can easily put you over your hosting account’s monthly data transfer limit. Even the Big Boys worry about bandwidth. Major online news publishers routinely look for hosting solutions that allow them to better distribute both the load and expense of multimedia content.

Indie publishers, just starting in multimedia, are not likely to move straight into an Akamai or a Brightcove account. But that doesn’t mean indies do not have options to offload the expense of hosting online video or audio.

The obvious solution for online video is YouTube. But is there a YouTube-style solution for audio files?

One that I’ve found, and been happy with, is Houndbite. It’s a hosting site and social network community that encourages people to “listen to and share the audio clips from your life.”

Hey, you are a journalist, so the “audio clips from your life” include interviews, right?

Much like with YouTube, you sign up, upload files, then get HTML code with which you can embed the audio clip on your website. The Houndbite front page features most popular clips measured in hundreds of listens, not the hundreds of thousands of views that one finds on YouTube’s front page. And the top clips on Houndbite tend to be prank calls, and not, uh, NPR-quality interviews. So, to date, there’s no grassroots-marketing value in posting to Houndbite, as there can be in posting your site’s video to the community on YouTube.

But they’re picking up the bandwidth cost, so the value to the news publisher is in holding down publishing expenses, as well as the ability to embed audio in standard blog or discussion forum content management systems, with having to install additional extensions.

The catch? Size. Houndbite currently limits each uploaded clip to 8MB in size and 15 minutes in length, so this isn’t the place to stash super-long-form narrative audio. But for a few audio clips to enliven a blog post, Houndbite provides a quick and handy solution. I used the service last week to add audio clips to blog posts I filed after a couple of interviews for another website.

I slapped a Belkin TuneTalk to the bottom of my iPod, recorded the interviews, downloaded them to my MacBook Pro with iTunes, clipped them down to size with Audacity, then saved them as MP3s for upload to Houndbite. (The service currently accepts only MP3 files.) Copy the embed code, paste it into the blog entry, and it’s done.

I know that some online journalists are concerned about the reliability of third-party hosting. (For what it is worth, I would never suggest uploading content to a third-party service without maintaining the original in your own possession — preferably, backed up at multiple locations, such as on a local machine and on a remote drive or DVD.) Some publishers also do not like the look of a third-party embed within their webpages. But that asset and design control comes at a cost.

If you are just starting out, that cost might be one worth cutting in an attempt to get your online publishing efforts into the black as soon as possible. Perhaps, some day, if you’ve got the revenue rolling in, you can revisit this decision and look for a more integrated hosting solution. But, for now, Houndbite might be worth a look by independent online news publishers looking to keep their bandwidth costs to a minimum.

Anyone can start a blog, for free and in minutes, using established and popular services such as Blogger and WordPress.com. What would entice a reader to avoid those options in favor of maintaining their blog on your website?

The answer is one word: community.

Most readers, like professional writers, want an audience for their work. Putting a blog online isn’t like putting a magazine on the rack at Borders. Starting a blog on Blogger, while technically simple, does little to put a writer’s word in front of a potential audience. Promoting the new blog remains the writer’s responsibility, and many fall short of the challenge.

Launching a new blog within an established website community, however, gives a new blogger a head start on promoting his or her work. Within the community, bloggers become the audience for their fellow bloggers’ work. And if the blogging community is part of a larger content-driven website, such as an online newspaper, non-writing readers can more easily find and become fans of a new blog.

Newspapers are embracing reader blogging as a way to both attract user-generated content (and increased page views) for a website, as well as to build loyalty among readers. USA Today has built ambitious social media initiative within its website, and other Gannett papers now are inviting their readers to blog with them.

But… if you are launching a new blog community, how do you get the bloggers you need to make that community an alluring place for would-be bloggers to launch?

Chicken, meet egg.

Here are five steps that your news website can take to avoid that classic dilemma, and to build an active and engaging online blogging community among your readers.

1. Make it easy

I don’t want to make this article an analysis of individual software tools that could power your blogging service, but it is important that whatever tool you choose, it be easy for readers to set-up and to use. You will find it difficult to build a critical mass of bloggers if readers must wait for your staff to manually approve each new account, for example.

Registration and initial set-up must be as swift and automatic as setting up an account on one of the other free services, such as Blogger and WordPress.com. (If you are worried about abuse, make sure your tools includes a way for staff to close accounts and delete improper content easily.)

Readers should have an easy-to-remember, search-engine friendly URL for the home pages of their blogs, too. No one wants to tell their friends about their new blog at blogs.newspaper.com/users/front.asp?id=4231 when they could opt for theirname.blogspot.com instead.

Your tool ought to support automated services to promote your readers’ blogs, as well, including automatic RSS feeds, as well as pings to Technorati and Google Blogs when readers post.

2. Don’t hide your bloggers

Readers’ blogs should be easy to find on the website, and not hidden deep within a subsection of some subsection. Follow a basic search engine optimization rule and link your reader blog home page from your site’s home page. Link individual reader bloggers (or, at least the best ones – see point below) from that page, so that they will not be more than two links from your home page. That will provide them a powerful PageRank boost in Google, as well as the ability to be found and indexed quickly in other search engines.

3. Reward readers for blogging well

Reward them with prominence. Create a process through which either your staff or readers themselves can designate outstanding posts for the blog front page, or even the front page of the parent website. Once you get to the point where you have too many bloggers to link individually on your blog front page, reward your best bloggers with those links (and their search engine value).

4. Establish topic-driven communities

With the first three steps taken, you have established a strong framework for your blogging community. But you still need readers to move in. For that, you need to inspire their muse by asking them to write about something that animates their daily lives.

The problem with inviting readers to “blog here” is the same one that confronts diners opening a 20-page menu. What to choose? Too many choices can inspire mental gridlock.

And if you want high-quality content, you need bloggers who are writing uninformed opinion, but about the rich detail of something interesting in their personal lives. Certain topics, therefore, better lend themselves to robust blogging communities.

A personal example: The blogging section on my wife’s violin website has attracted several dozen regular bloggers, while blogs on my theme park website drew few writers. (We used the same publishing tool on both sites.) Playing the violin is a daily activity, one that becomes a significant part of people’s identity. Most people visit a theme park just once or twice a year. It isn’t something that defines most people interested in the topic. So it wasn’t as attractive a topic for personal blogging as the violin site provided. That’s why we shuttered the blogs on the theme park site and the violin blogs continue to prosper.

There’s nothing keeping a general interest site, such as an online newspaper, from creating multiple blog communities around several different topics. Just because your site covers multiple beats does not mean that you must stick with a single, generic reader blog community.

5. Provide an example

We’ve written this many times before on OJR, but we’ll say it again: You cannot just build a user-generated content tool, and expect that people will come and provide great content. You must provide leadership. You must provide an example that readers can model. So you must have someone on staff blogging, using the same tool as readers, in the same content community.

Staff bloggers using a separate platform won’t have the same leadership effect on their site’s reader blogs as they would if they used the same tool as readers. That’ll just send readers the message that they are second-class citizens, and even being disrespected somewhat.

Of course staff writers ought to be producing better quality content, and ought to be given more prominence within the blogging community as a result. (One suggestion: Staffers get automatic promotion to the higher prominence slots described in step 2.) If a community is to prosper, readers need to a see connection between themselves and their community’s leaders. Writing on the same platform can do that simply and effectively.

Leadership also should include clear and consistent posted guidelines that can help prevent misunderstandings about what is fair game in the blogs, including rules about appropriate language and conduct. Don’t make all the guidelines negative, either. Guidelines can also suggest tips and tricks to help readers improve their observation skills, enable basic reporting and enliven their writing.

Reader bloggers can help deepen a publication’s coverage, with additional personal vignettes and original perspectives that staff writers wouldn’t be able to collect using traditional reporting methods and the same number of hours in the day. But a few moments of advance thought can help determine whether a new blogging tool will enable a vibrant community, or open yet another empty forum.

As online journalists, many of us straddle both worlds. Many of us work for newspaper-dot-coms; others at least started their careers in print.

Are any of us still reading the “dead tree edition?” If so, how many newspapers a day are you reading? And how many did you read a decade ago?

Journalists, one might presume, ought to be the biggest fans and consumers of journalism. Can online journalists, folks at leading edge of industry change, still be counted on to take the print edition? Or have we bailed on print, too?

Tell us in the comments which papers you still read in print, and which you would recommend. Or, if you are not reading papers in print, tell us what might help you change your mind and subscribe to a print newspaper in the future.

Which brings us to this week’s reader question. Actually, it isn’t from a reader, but from a fellow participant in last week’s NewsTools 2008 conference. He asked the question during the session with Google News’ Daniel Meredith, and I thought it worth discussing on OJR, because I saw a lot of heads nodding in the room as he asked it.

Meredith had mentioned robots.txt as a solution to help publishers control what content on their websites that Google’s indexing spiders would see. A hand shot up.

“What is robots-dot-text?”

Meredith gave a quick and accurate answer, but I’m going to go a little more in depth, for the benefit of not-so-tech-savvy online journalists who want the hard work on their websites to get the best possible position in search engine results.

Note that I wrote “the best possible position,” and not “the top position.” There’s a difference, and I will get to that in a moment.

First, robots.txt is simply a plain-text file that a Web publisher should put in the root directory of their website. (E.g. http://www.www.ojr.org/robots.txt. It’s there; feel free to take a look.) The text files includes instructions that tell indexing spiders, or “robots,” what content and directories on that website they may, or may not, look at.

Here’s an example of a robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.doc$
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /ads

This file tells the “Mediapartners-Google” spider that it can look at anything on the website. (That’s the spider that Google uses to assist in the serving of AdSense ads.) Then, it tells other spiders that they should not look at any Microsoft Word documents, GIF or JPGs images, or anything in the “ads” directory on the website. The asterisk, or *, is a “wild card” that means “any value.”

Let’s say a search engine spider finds an image file in a story that’s it is looking at one your website. The image file is located on your server at /news/local/images/mugshot.jpg, that is, it is a file called mugshot.jpg, located within the images directory within the local directory within the news directory on your Web server.

Your robots.txt file told the spider not to look at any files that match the pattern /*.jpg. This file is /news/local/images/mugshot.jpg, so it matches that pattern (the asterisk * taking the place of news/local/images/mugshot). So the spider will ignore this, and any other .jpg file it finds on your website.

So why is this important to an online journalist? Remember that Meredith said Google penalizes websites for duplicate content. If you want to protect your position in Google’s search engine results and in Google News, you want to search engine spiders to focus on content that is unique to your website, and ignore stuff that isn’t.

So, for example, you might want to configure your robots.txt so it ignores all AP and other wire stories on your website. The easiest way to do this is to configure your content management system to route all wire stories into a Web directory called “wire.” Then put the following lines into your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wire

Boom. Duplicate content problem for wire stories solved. Now this does mean that Web searchers will no longer be able to find wire stories on your website through search engines. But many local publishers would be that result as a feature, not a bug. I’ve heard many newspaper publishers argue that coming to their sites from search engine links to wire content do not convert for site advertisers and simply hog site bandwidth.

If you are using a spider to index your website for an internal search engine, though, you will need to allow that spider to see the wire content, if you want it included in your site search. If that’s the case, add these lines above the previous ones in your robots.txt:

User-agent: name-of-your-spider
Allow: /wire

Or, use

User-agent: name-of-your-spider
Allow: *

… if you wish it to see and index all of the content on your site.

Sometimes, you do not want to be in the top position in the search engine results, or even in those results at all. On OJR, we use robots.txt to keep robots from indexing images, as well as a few directories where we store duplicate content on the site.

Other publishers might effectively use robots.txt to exclude premium content directories, files stores on Web servers that aren’t meant for public use, or files that you do not wish to be viewed by Web visitors except those who find or follow the file from within another page on your website.

Unfortunately, many rogue spiders roam the Internet, ignoring robots.txt and scraping content from sites without pause. Robots.txt won’t stop those rogues, but most Web servers can be configure to ignore requests from selected IP addresses. Find the IPs of those spiders, and you can block them from your site. But that’s a topic for another day.

There’s no good reason to lament search engines finding and indexing content that you don’t want anyone other that your existing site visitors or other selected individuals to see. Nor do you have to suffer duplicate content penalties because you run a wire feed on your site. A thoughtful robots.txt strategy can help Web publishers optimize their search engine optimization efforts.

Want more information on creating or fine-tuning a robots.txt file? There’s a good FAQ [answers to frequently asked questions] on robots.txt at http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.

Got a question for the online journalism experts at OJR? E-mail it to OJR’s editor, Robert Niles, via ojr(at)www.ojr.org

Last month Tunsion—aka Christmas Ape—came out of Internet anonymity with a KSK entry documenting his inebriation one ancient evening at (gasp) a sports bar. Turns out that was the Washington Post’s cue to fire him, within 48 hours of the post, for “discrediting the publication.”

The Web backlash to WaPo’s knee-jerk reaction was immediate and expected. For HR malpractice. For stodgy new-media ignorance. For axing a potential traffic cow.

But don’t quit your day job, Mike. KSK is of course booming on the heels of the incident, and Tunison is content, sort of, to be uncaged in that space.

We caught up with him over e-mail for a closer look at the whole mess.

OJR: Is there anything defensible about this? Or does a part of you think WaPo did what it had to do?

MT: I think The Post has a right to uphold and enforce whatever stodgy standards of conduct that it deems appropriate. I don’t they would have acted as extremely or as quickly as they did if it wasn’t first picked up by a journalism blog. In that case, the editors probably felt pressure from within the journalism community to cleanse whatever damage they thought I was doing to the Post brand.

OJR: Sounds like it was technically over your post about being drunk at a bar, but that seems a little far-fetched. There’s got to be more to it than that. They say you “discredited” the publication. But what was actually said to you. Anything verbal, or did it all come in memos?

MT: Far-fetched though it may seem, that’s what they said. The day after I put up the outing post, I got a call from the top editor of the Metro section, who was already making clear I was in deep shit and was probably going to be fired. He essentially wanted my reasons for doing so to run by personnel. The next day, I was called back into his office where he laid out the terms of my dismissal. He said the drunk picture coupled with the language while linking to my Post stories violated the paper’s standards.

OJR: Seems to me they would have been a bit better off to give you a slap on the wrist and leverage you for site traffic. Are you at all surprised they couldn’t see it that way?

MT: I figured the penalty would be less severe and there would be more room for discussion. I’m not surprised at all that they couldn’t find something for me to do with The Post’s Web operation. There’s a stunning lack of vision at The Washington Post when it comes to Web-exclusive content. Not to mention that the disconnect between The Post and its website is astounding. The Washington CityPaper did a great piece on that a few months ago. Look at Dan Steinberg’s D.C. Sports Bog. It’s probably the best executed sports blog by a mainstream publication and it’s barely promoted at all by the organization. Sure, one post makes it to page 2 of sports section in the print paper, but log onto The Post’s site and you’d never know it existed. You have to really dig through that unwieldy thing to find it.

OJR: Surely you had to be expecting a knee-jerk reaction of some sort. To what extent did you think it would be feasible for your two writing lives to coexist?

MT: I thought so. As I’ve said on the site, there was no overlap at all between what I did for the paper and the writing at KSK. I also made pains on the revealing post to not actually write out my name and the publication. You could only find those things by visiting The Post and clicking through the links. A Google search of my name or The Washington Post wouldn’t have brought it up, so no one would have discovered it except readers of Kissing Suzy Kolber. Now, readers of KSK and WaPo readers aren’t mutually exclusive, but you can be damn sure KSK readers didn’t think my employment there hurt the paper in any way.

OJR: It sucks to lose the 9 to 5, but how bitter are you, really, considering you come off as the good guy in all this?

MT: I’m a little bitter because I was never really given an opportunity to excel at The Post and as soon as I develop something for myself that garners some success, they find out about it and can me. When I’m doing uninteresting work, I’m going to need a creative outlet on the side.

OJR: How, if at all, are you pursuing other newspaper jobs? Or are you done with MSM? If so, why?

MT: I’m not going after any newspaper jobs at the moment. Partly because I don’t want to but also because they wouldn’t hire me even if I did. Just this past week, the guy who runs The Sporting News’ blog, The Sporting Blog, wanted to bring me on to do some work with them and he was shot down by higher-ups. The reason: because I’m too “controversial” after this firing. I’m sure I’m blackballed from a number of places, probably forever. It’s a little pathetic, really. The mainstream journalism community is so insular and at the same time so terrified. The situation is just going to get worse for them until they reevaluate more than just staff sizes. I have other aspirations, but I’m happy with blogging for now. I make about as much as I did at The Post, which wasn’t much, with writing for a few blogs. I can be happy with that for a bit.

OJR: How has your role on KSK changed through all this? Obviously you have more time to put toward it, but do you feel at all uncaged or liberated in terms of your content?

MT: KSK has never really been a place where I’ve felt limited in terms of what I can say, so the firing doesn’t change much. I have more time and am writing a little more, but it’s still the off-season and there’s only so much to write about. Before coming forward, I had to be more guarded with personal information, which I don’t anymore.

OJR: This is the best PR imaginable for KSK. How has site traffic looked since the coming-out party? Are you guys looking to expand the site out of this?

MT: There was a big initial burst of traffic right after the outing. We had 108,000 unique visitors the day after I got fired. We average around 22,000 or so per day. It’s still been a little higher since than it was before the incident. We probably gained a few readers, but most of the other people were there because it was in the news. As far as expanding, the firing coincided with moving the site to a new address after reaching a contract with a nascent blog network. There are big plans for that network. As far as KSK, there are things we’re planning on adding here and there, like a liveblog of a game every week during the season. Other than that, we’re just keeping with what’s worked for us.

Meredith explained how Google makes the decision to include a website in Google News, and what else news publishers can do to improve their websites’ performance in the view of Google’s robot army.

Why should publishers care? Google News is one of the world’s most popular news portals, “in the top five worldwide,” according to Meredith. As important than occasional presence on the Google News front page, though, is presence in Google highly popular e-mail news alerts, which draw upon, and drive traffic to, Google News-indexed websites.

These alerts don’t just drive traffic to the New York Times and CNN. News sites covering a niche area can see hundreds, if not thousands, of new daily unique visitors if their stories are included in a keyword-driven Google News e-mail alert.

Finally, “being in [Google] News does buy you credit in Web” search results, Meredith said. News publishers undermine their search engine optimization strategy by not making a request for inclusion in Google News.

And if you haven’t asked, you are not in, Meredith said. News publishers must make an explicit request for inclusion in Google News. Though Google News is published by an algorithm, the decision to include a particular website as a source in Google News is made by human beings, Meredith said.

“What do we look for?” asked Meredith. Four things, he replied: