To that end, please take 10 minutes to fill out a short, anonymous customer survey.

Thanks, in advance, for your thoughtful answers and please pass this request to any of your colleagues who use the service.   As always, you can reach me at jbrock(at)attributor(dot)com.

~Jim

1. Sites to Review . An algorithm-generated list of the match sites which really need your attention. The screen offers a number of workflow actions for each match site.
2. Watch List . One of the actions from the Sites to Review screen is to put a match site on the Watch List. Once the match site has been moved to the Watch List, you can review all of the matches on that match site in turn, and send remedies as desired.
3. Licensing Opportunities . Another action from the Sites to Review list is to add the match site to a list of potential licensees… and then hand that view over to the Sales team to give them the opportunity to generate new revenue.
4. User-controlled definition of Extensive Matches . The Extensive Matches metric is a important component of the Sites to Review workflow. You now have the ability to control the definition of an extensive match.
5. Workflow enhancements . To improve the Attributor workflow, we’ve moved some of the dashboards and match view filters into subsections of other areas of the service.

Read on for more details.

Sites to Review

Sites to Review is the new entry page on the Attributor text service and is designed to highlight the most important match sites to drive your daily workflow. It dynamically generates a list of high-interest match sites, based on a weighted view of several key match metrics.

When you are looking at a site in the Sites to Review page, consider all the factors — is this site making money off of my content? (Look for the $ icon). Is this site using a lot of my content? (# of matches, # Extensive Matches). Are they getting a lot of traffic, meaning that my content is being seen by a lot of people? Can I convert this site to a licensee and make money from their use of my content, either through sharing ad revenues or through a straight license deal, or do I need to send a takedown request based on the way they are using my content?

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

Watch List

(click the image to enlarge)

Once you’ve decided that a site on the Sites to Review page needs to be considered for a removal or other action, you can move the site to the Watch List. From the Watch List you can review each match on the domain in turn — or ignore the match.

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

(click the image to enlarge)

Once you’ve decided to Review for Removal, you’ve got some new options in the Match Details page:

(click the image to enlarge)

You can:

• Request a Link
  
• Offer a License
• Send a Removal
• New! Ignore the match (make it disappear from the list)
• New! Skip the match (It’s still there, you can come come back to it later).
  

Licensing Opportunities

From the Sites to Review List, one option is to add sites to the Licensing Opportunities list. This list is designed to present your Sales of Business Development team with a list of relevant sites that might make good partners or licensees. Instant return on your investment — here’s a list of sites that should be paying you for your content!

Note that the entire list may be exported to Excel for offline review.

User Controlled Definition of Extensive Matches

Extensive Matches are the matches that we’ve found that use a significant portion of your source article and are an important factor in determining Sites to Review candidates. In this release, we allow users with the appropriate permission setting define the rules for what matches are considered extensive.

(click the image to enlarge)

Workflow enhancements

We’ve moved some of the pages around in the interface to make your daily workflow easier. Here are the changes:

• Dashboards have been moved. The All Matches Dashboard is under the Summary tab; the Licensed Dashboard is under the Licensing tab as the Licensee Summary, with a toggle to show Unlicensed Summary (Dashboard).

(click the image to enlarge)

• Remedy tracking dashboards have been moved from the Remedies tab to reside within their category tabs — for example, License Request tracking may be found under the Licensing Tab, and Takedown Requests may be found under the Removals tab.
• The All Matches table is under the Matches tab; Licensed and Unlicensed tables are under the Licensing tab.
• The Licensee List has been moved under the Licensing tab.

What’s Next!

We’re testing a handful of near-term improvements to the Attributor Text Service. Stay tuned for:

• Enhanced Match Duplication Removal . We’ve made significant progress on this issue to date; our next release focuses on clearing out the remaining duplicates.
  
• Blog Domain Separation . Right now, Blogspot, Wordpress, etc. show up as single domains, and it is difficult to see which blogs on these domains are reusing your content. Shortly, we will begin treating each of these bloggers as their own domain and you will be able to see individual blogs within Sites to Review.
  

We Want your Feedback

As always, we are interested in your input, particularly with the Sites to Review workflow. Did we get the altorithm right — are we showing you the match sites you want to see? If we are, please tell us; we like to know when we we hit the mark. If we are not, then we hope you will take a few moments and tell us why — it’s far more important, of course, for us to know if we didn’t get it right than if we did. Please send comments directly to me (david <at> attributor.com) or to feedback <at> attributor.com.

Here are a few examples of what you can do with the current Match API:

• Plug the Match data into your CMS enabling your writers to see where their content is spreading across the blogosphere and social networks
• Automatically check the originality of your content before it gets published
• Join match data with your web analytics software to better understand the traffic each piece of content is driving back to your site

We’re eager for your input to drive what we build next. Some of the ideas include:

• Provide source and match summary data to easily integrate into your daily/weekly/monthly management reports
• Analyze licensee content usage across multiple dimensions on numerous 3rd party reporting packages
• Send all the urls containing your content directly to the ad networks and get your fair share of the revenue pie

Want to learn more about implementing the Match API? Have an opinion on what we should build next? Drop me a line at tj<at>attributor<dot>com

1. New Roles functionality that gives you the ability to assign either “read-only,” “read and send remedies and change licensee lists,” and “full control over other users” roles to users.
2. Enhancements to the Match Details page which make sending and receiving Remedies easier
3. Externally-accessible view of Source, Match, and Remedy requests so that recipients of Remedies can see the original and matched content in context.
4. Support for wildcard characters in domain searches

Roles

Roles allows you to control what functions your colleagues can use. The basic roles are:

• Viewer. Can only look at data, export, etc. No ability to change licensee/ignored site status, matching status, send Remedies, or modify account information
• Manager: Able to do anything a viewer can do, plus send Remedies, change licensee/ignored site status, modify account information.
• Administrator: Able to do everything a Manager can do, plus can assign roles to existing users.

Only Attributor can add new users, however. If you are ready to roll out Roles, please send a note to david-at-attributor-dot-com with a list of userID’s and role settings for each of your accounts.

(click on the pictures below to see them full-sized)

Match Details Page Enhancements

In place of the “Source” and “Match” cards, individual tabs have been implemented. In addition, we’ve added a tab for Remedies that enables you to see if a Remedy has already been sent for the match. This is particularly helpful if you have multiple Remedies users within your organization.

Also added here is a link to see all matches on this domain — essentially, this allows you to get to the Matches by Domain view without clicking the <back> button.

External Remedies Match Details

One comment we heard from a number of customers was, “Is there a way to show the recipients of my Remedies requests what I’m seeing?” Now there is. When recipients get a Remedy request on a particular match, the request will include a link back to a page where they can see the same Source, Match, and Remedies pages as are presented to you (minus the rest of the functionality). The feature also includes the ability for the recipient of the request to respond directly back to the sender of the Remedy, or to forward the Remedy request onwards to another party.

Wildcard Support in Domain Search

This feature allows you to look for a domain in the Match Domains search window without knowing the exact domain name. Supported Characters are:

• ? — the question mark allows you to look for a single character wild card. Example: Yaho?
  • Returns “yahoo.com” and “yahom.com”
• * — the asterisk allows you to look for more than one character wild card. Example: Yah*
  • returns “Yahoo.com” and “yahahah.com” and “yahyahyah.com”

As always, we’re eager for your feedback; please send all comments to david<at>attributor<dot>com. Thank you for your support!

–David

First, thanks to everyone who completed the survey.  No one has an extra 10 minutes these days, but the responses are extremely helpful to help us prioritize what we work on next.

Two major themes emerged:

1. We need to make it easier to isolate your biggest problem or opportunity areas. We’ve spent the 1st part of the year increasing the number of accurate matches for your content, and now you want us to help filter the most interesting ones to the top.    A match prioritization prototype has already been developed, the result of which you will be able to see soon when you log-in and in a handful of new reports we’re working on.
2. We need to reduce the number of duplicate article matches. De-duplicating across 25 billion pages is a challenge, but we’re working on a way to do this without reducing our coverage.   This is a top priority for us.

Again, thanks for the feedback, and please don’t feel you have to save it for the surveys.  David is a great advocate for each of you in our product planning meetings, and you can always reach me at jbrock(at)attributor(dot)com.

~Jim

During the last few months we were very active in adding high-quality, verifiable news sites to our crawlers, and we recently exceeded 10,000 English speaking news sites. This means we can legitimately say we have better News coverage than Google.

Due to the international nature of our customers, we will, over the course of next few months, begin expanding our news site coverage to include Spanish, French, German and Italian language sites. We hope to cover thousands of additional international, non-English sites by the end of the year.

We’ve split the Dashboard up into four separate, contextually-driven sections, and added new metrics and new graphics that better show the spread of your content across the web, and how it’s being used by both your licensees and by those nefarious non-licensed sites. The objective here is to give you more actionable information for your Sales teams, and bubble up those sites that may require special attention from your Compliance folks. We’ve also added a page that shows new, relevant information for the Editorial team.

The Dashboard is now four separate screens. The first three screens build on the data we presented in the previous Dashboard, but with greater detail and with the ability to display match data based on Licensee status; the previous dashboard showed only Unlicensed match information. These changes will also extend to the Match Site Profile Page. Most importantly, we’ve included some important new metrics on these pages. These are:

• Number of match sites with ads
• Average matches per site
• Extensive & Ads chart (shows how many sites are using >50% of your source documents and making money off of them).

The new Matches dashboard

The fourth screen is an entirely new screen and comprises the original “Top Copied Sources” sub-screen from the original Dashboard plus new summary data for ingested sources and overall publishing status trends. Top Copied Sources can also now be displayed for 7 or 30 days of data. The new metrics on this screen are:

• Sources Copied – sources that have at least one match
• Average Matches per Source
• Average % Copied
• Average Words Copied

The new All Sources dashboard

The new release also brings in a new sorting feature for matches, both by domain and by source: Sort by Date. This allows you to sort by the Match Date or % Copied, as opposed to the previous hardwired % copied sort order.

Sort by date – available for both domain-level matches (shown) or source match lists

These changes have come in direct response to requests and feedback from our growing customer base. Your ideas drive our product. I’d like encourage you to send all your ideas, feedback, even criticisms, to me, every time something occurs to you. My job is to make sure that you get what you need from our services, and that includes making sure that your brilliant ideas get incorporated into the next (and next, and next) releases of our products. If you don’t have my email address, it’s david <at> attributor.com. I sit next to the Product Manager, and every idea you send, I immediately discuss it with him and the rest of the Product team, and then we batch them up for review by a larger team, and those ideas that we either can or feel we should execute on, get scheduled into the product roadmap. So, please keep the feedback coming!

-David