Imagine if you could monitor every time someone copies and pastes something off your site. To make it even better, what if you can insert a backlink when you text is pasted somewhere else. It’s a great way for attribution, tracking what content is popular, and gaining some inbound links.

There is a service called Tynt Insight that allows you to do this. It’s a free service and there is even a slick reporting dashboard. You simply signup, generate your unique bit of JavaScript and insert it into your site.

Load time is barely impacted since the script is lightweight and Tynt’s servers have been super quick. There’s some customizable options offered by Tynt like changing the attribution link, being able to recognize the number of visits generated by these attribution links. You to see the total number of copies for text or images, see what pages on your site are getting copied the most, what words are getting copied the most and heat map overlays . Mike Wong at Tynt Insight is a great guy and Tynt’s product is jaw dropping.

I have Tynt Insight running on this site. Give it a try by copying and pasting a chunk of text from this site.

To get your own copy, visit http://www.tynt.com/

One of my favorite applications on the web is a free Java application called TouchGraph Google Browser. I use it to help in everything from finding inbound link opportunities to planning a linkwheel strategy and even helps with reputation management projects.

There are a couple tools available on the TouchGraph site, but the one I use is the free TouchGraph Google Browser tool and you can find it here: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

You can type a keyword or website into the search bar and this free Java application will build a graph of related sites. It uses Google’s database of related websites to generate the graphs, but it’s the presentation of that information that keeps me coming back.

The image above is an example of running the application for the keyword “golf”. I really recommend you visit the site and give it a try. It’s free – you’ve got nothing to lose! Again, you can type in a keyword, phrase, or site.