Articles | Effective Internet Use | How To Fight Plagiarism .
If you're the person responsible for your website's content, you know how hard it can be to get everything right.
You need to have the raw materials, the facts and figures around which you're creating your copy.
You have to think about the tone of what you're writing and how it fits in with the rest of the site.
You need to construct your argument carefully, deciding the audience you're writing for.
You also have to make sure everything is completely consistent, style-wise.
Do you say "you are" or "you're"? Do you have them both?
Stuff that may seem over-analysed and not worth the trouble, but absolutely necessary.
That's why it's so maddening when you get ripped off. When someone trawls through your site, sees something they like, and then just steals it for their own site, maybe changing the odd word here or there.
And what can you do? The Internet is global, so anyone, anywhere, could right now be looking at your site and thinking "I'll have a piece of that". What's to stop them changing a few things around and then passing it off as something they wrote themselves?
I'll introduce you to a site I came across a few years ago. It's called "Copyscape" and means I don't worry about people ripping me off anymore.
The site allows you to input your website's URL. Press "Go" and their search function will do a trawl of the Internet to see if your text has been stolen. It's completely free and will show you up to five results. If you think your copy may have been stolen by more than five sites, you can sign up for the "Premium" service, which charges 5 cents per search.