VentureBeat

Associated Content is a sort of Wikipedia but comprised of professionally written articles that it pays people to write. Last month, it had a big problem: charges of plagiarism. Tech news blog Mashable discovered that a person was copying Mashable posts verbatim and selling them to Associated Content.

Plagiarism can be a big problem for any web publisher that spends money on creating content. To avoid repeat situations like the Mashable copier, Associated Content is hiring Attributor, a company that offers web-based software to help publishers discover plagiarized content across the web and make money off of the copycats.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Attributor indexes more than 15 billion pages, matching the content on those pages with more than a trillion “fingerprints,” such as paragraphs and metadata about images and video (our coverage).

The company has already impressed some large content producers. Last year, it began testing with two of the largest news services in the world, Reuters and the Associated Press, both of which have since joined as clients. It has also been in talks with book publishers and other large media organizations.

New York-based Associated Content, which also publishes contributors’ audio and video recordings, already has both human editors as well as software to monitor articles for quality and for plagiarism (so it was able to discover and take down the posts, before using Attributor’s software). But the company is focused on creating content, not building anti-plagiarism technology. It pays you to write an article on any topic, then publishes it to the web, gets traffic through search engine results, and makes its money on advertising. And it’s growing fast.

It needs technology that’s been proven to scale in guarding against plagiarism, as Attributor has done. Associated Content has doubled in size to more than a million pageviews a day over the last half a year, it says, and gets more than six million unique visitors a month, according to Comscore.

Associated Content will use Attributor both to detect copied material in submitted articles and to check that its own material isn’t being copied across the web.

Attributor provides a set of web analytics so publishers can see which other sites are using their content, a service launched in early November. This sets the company apart from competitors, chief executive Jim Brock tells me. (Other companies — text-search Copyscape and image-search Cognisign — are also trying to identify plagiarized material.)

It helps a publisher understand how other sites are using its content, and how the proliferation of copying on the web can actually be a good thing, says Brock, a former Yahoo senior vice president.

First, Attributor lets a publisher see if a copycat site has its own advertising in place, and how much traffic that site is getting. The publisher can then use this data to demand a share of ad sales.

Second, Attributor gives the publisher the option to automatically ask offending sites to link back to it. If the offending sites are credible with search engines, these links will increase the publisher’s search engine ranking in search results, leading to more traffic.

You need to contact the company via their web site for pricing information.

I can see Attributor doing quite well with smaller publishers, including news blogs and the many online video companies that are coming out with professionally-produced videos these days. VentureBeat is also going to be looking at using this service.

Here’s the latest action:

Google Korea has cluttered page — This is a striking departure from the spartan interface Google is known for. Details here. We checked with Google, and a spokeswoman confirmed the Korean site was developed in response to market research and feedback from Korean users. She called it a “new intuitive and easy-to-use design” that helps discover Google products and services.

AOL serving ads in IM and chat — AOL subsidiary Userplane lets Website publishers install IM, chat and other widgets and serve advertising within them, sharing revenue with Userplane. It is called Userplane Money.

Volpi joins Joost? — Mike Volpi, who gave up his CEO-in-waiting job at Cisco in February, is reportedly joining Internet TV company Joost as CEO (source: PaidContent). Volpi served on the board of Skype, the previous company of Joost’s co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, so this isn’t out of the blue.

RealNetworks releases new player that lets you capture Flash video — With one click on a video you see online, you can save the file — whether Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media — to your desktop, and burn it to a CD or DVD. The player will be out next month. This capability has been offered by other companies, but not by a major player like Real. Video with DRM, however, won’t work. If you’re interested in this, Scoble has details in the video below:

Google Street View continued — They should have called Google’s latest map service, Street View the Google Living Room View instead. Turns out Google has been driving its own cars around the Bay Area and collecting street level views, including of tabby cats in people’s homes. Bizarre. Google also partnered with Immersive Media for the street service.

Panoramio, bought by Google — For every company squashed out of existence by Google for doing mashups that Google can easily replicate, there’s one that ends up getting snapped up with welcome Google dollars. Panoramio, which lets users upload their photos to share them on Google Earth, is the latest.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s clean-tech agenda — Passing through Silicon Valley today, she lobbies for the establishment of a Strategic Energy Fund to coordinate research on energy and global-warming solutions, provide tax incentives for home and businesses to become more energy efficient, and help install E85 pumps for ethanol-enhanced gasoline and more. See the WSJ, which reports she’d even support the creation of bacteria to remove radioactive materials from the atmosphere.

Despite past failures, another effort to take on the NFL — Bill Hambrecht, the well-known San Francisco banker who tried to take on the IPO establishment with his “Open IPO,” is doing it again. He’s starting a professional football league called the United Football League. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks, will be a team owner. Hambrecht, you may forget, has a history. He was part owner of a team of the earlier failure, the United States Football League. (See NYT)

Facebook’s Platform slammed this afternoon — After seeing Facebook’s Platform site down periodically over the course of this afternoon, we checked with Facebook to ask what was up. Spokeswoman Brandee Barker: “We’re experiencing an unexpected surge in the number of applications being built on Facebook Platform – more than 300 as of this morning.”

Is EMI’s music really DRM-free? — Well, that’s the announcement we covered earlier, but what we didn’t know at the time is that the EMI songs sold via iTunes without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you (Arstechnica).

News corp confirms Flektor and Photobucket purchases — See statement here. Photobucket deal rumored to be $250 million.

Attributor to track copyright material for AP — Attributor, a company in Redwood City, Calif., said its filtering technology will be used to fingerprint AP copy and to identify and document its display wherever it appears across the Internet. Attributor is just one of many digital fingerprinting technologies that have popped up over the past year.

Yahoo’s technology chief resigns from Yahoo — Farzad Nazem leaves just six months after Yahoo named him head of the company’s newly created technology group, saying he simply wants to retire.

Want to try Spock? — Here are a few invitations for Spock’s people search engine, still in closed testing.

Google Mapplets — Just when you thought you’d seen enough Google Maps, there’s another barrage coming: Google has introduced Mapplets, giving developers a way to perform specialized searches directly within Google Maps. The example below is of movie search. You type in a zip code and a movie, and voila.

Updated

Attributor, a Redwood City start-up, is scanning the Web to fingerprint pages for copyrighted audio, video, images and text, to give publishers a way to request that Web sites take down priated content — or pay for it, at least.

The company’s statement is here; there’s a good summary in the WSJ today.

This service has an obvious market, highlighted by YouTube’s continued hosting of pirated video and music. Publishers need tools to find that content, in order to request YouTube take it down.

The company has just raised a second round of venture capital, bringing its total to $10 million. Led by Sigma Partners, the latest round includes Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital. Ron Conway is also a seed investor.

It is the latest company of Jim Brock, formerly a Yahoo senior vice president of Yahoo, and Jim Pitkow, former chief executive of Moreover, who has done extensive research in information retrieval.

Its also the latest company with a name ending with the active/aggressive suffix, “-tor,” as in termina-tor and. Another product, Xcavator by CogniSign, is also looking at ways to help publishers find copyrighted ads online.

Indigo Stream Technologies, based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that does something similar to Attributor — it assesses a Web page and then uses Google’s search engine to look for a pirated copy elsewhere the Web.

Attributor is still in testing mode, but should be released next year. We first mentioned Attributor in June.