Online Journalism Blog

There was a recent post on OJB about the Daily Mail’s ‘feature’ that automatically adds a link and attribution to any text you copy – it turned out to be part of Tracer from Tynt.com, a service that lets you track how people are using content on your site.

I asked Derek from Tynt a few questions – and then I fed the whole lot into Xtranormal.com’s text to movie service. I would have tidied the interview up but I’ve left it verbatim underneath in case you can’t follow the video (which you can see in all its glory here – as this blog’s not quite wide enough to see the full picture!) …

ME: What have the most common use cases – and types of user – turned out to be in practice? Is it large publishers or small bloggers (or both?!?) And what are they using it for (to track, to get links etc)? [Read more]

Here’s a curious feature of stories on the Daily Mail website. When you copy text from an article and then paste it elsewhere you get something like the following appended to the end:

Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1164953/Nine-10-000-spied-councils-using-anti-terrorism-powers-innocent.html#ixzz0MBlQQrVf 

I’ve no idea how they do it, and I’m not even sure how I feel about it. On the one hand it feels rather intrusive and annoying in a world where the user experience is pretty important; on the other, in many cases it would save me time.

Here’s the article I was copying from – oh, hold on, I didn’t need to do that did I?

Would love your thoughts.

UPDATE: It seems the technology behind this may be by http://www.tynt.com/ – see comments. Also see the comments on this follow-up on The Next Web and this write-up of Tynt. Don’t you love the power of blogging?