Scoble’s got a post up about the Sentinel software from Blogwerx that monitors your content to see if it’s being republished anywhere else.
Some of Robert’s commenters are actually calling the software “vaporware” since the interface is incredibly buggy and doesn’t appear to actually do anything at the moment.
I recorded myself using the interface on both Safari and Firefox, and even though you can’t hear anything I’m saying, it’s pretty easy to see that the interface is damn buggy at present:
I really hope they fix whatever bug is going on, because this sounds like a really cool first step into shutting down sploggers. The software touts itself as a repository of information for blog hosts so that they can shut down blogs that are reproducing others’ content. This is fantastic and will hopefully cut back on the splog problem. But what about the average blogger on the street? What can he do about a site that’s reproducing content other than get royally pissed off?
Apparently, the most effective solutions rely on communities to police themselves through the use of services like Sentinel. A number of services have emerged that rely on people to report these blogs. This appears to be an expansion on this basic philosophy, but it’s not really enabling bloggers to do anything new…
FeedBurner could offer an awesome solution. If you burn your feed, it tracks “nontraditional uses” to help you discover re-bloggers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could track down those “nontraditional users” and block them from getting your feed? There has to be some way to do this, and it would actually give individual bloggers a weapon in the war against unauthorized repurposing.
