That’s were the new add-on Multi Links comes into play. The add-on offers the same functionality as Snap Links with the difference that it is compatible with the latest version of Firefox without having to force compatibility. Some users reported that Multi Links processes links better than Snap Links.

Links can be selected by right-clicking and drawing a rectangle around them. It is possible to cancel the operation with the left mouse button or pressing Esc. One interesting option is the ability to only open some of the links on the page by pressing the CTRL or Shift key to draw smaller rectangles around links.

Options are available the add-on options of the web browser that cover those of Snap Links.

• You can choose to open links in new tabs or new windows.
• You can choose whether to go to those new tabs/windows or stay on the current tab/window when they open.
• You can choose to copy to clipboard or to bookmark selected links.
• You can choose a selection and link box colour from the preset colours or in put your own hexadecimal colour code.
• You can choose the thickness of the link nd selection box borders.
• You can choose the line style of the box border to be solid, dotted or dashed.
• Smart selection is for search engines. It helps you by only selecting search listing results rather than including other links such as “similar”, “cached” or “filter” as well as other links that the search engines display.

Multi Links works perfectly and has replaced Snap Links Plus on my computer systems.

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Opinions about those sites differ from letting them do what they want with your content to contacting lawyers and suing them. Clever webmasters can use content copying websites to their advantage if they play their cards right. Since most of those websites use RSS feeds to automatically post the copied contents they include links in those posts automatically. Some even post tags or related posts of the original site as well.

This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process which in turn means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.

There are some sites that copy your content but do not post links at all. Experience has shown that contacting the site owners directly asking them to either remove the content or add a link using the article titles will be successful in most cases. There is not an easier way to get free targeted links than this way.

Here is one of the emails that we send out usually to offenders who do not link back to our site although they use our content on theirs:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’m writing on behalf of the technology blog ghacks.net. It has come to our attention that a blog located at http://***/ is publishing articles without authorization.

We are asking that the person responsible either

a) gives credit where credit is due by linking to the articles properly and visible using the title of the article as the link anchor or
b) removes all content that has been taken from ghacks.net

best regards

This is usually enough to receive a response in less than 48 hours. All that have been contacted so far have added title links to the original articles.

How To Find Content Copying Websites:

There are several ways to find websites that copy your content. You can copy a passage of one of your articles in a search engine or use services that will list most of the sites that copy the content. Some of the services are Fair Share or Copy Gator.

Fair Share does offer an RSS feed that lists all the websites that have been using at least 20% of the words of an original article on their website displaying if the copycats link back to the original post or not. This makes it easy to identify those sites that do not link back and contact them.

Options if the site owners do not comply

Webmasters have a few choices if site owners do not react at all to the request. They could contact the hoster of the domain, lawyers who take matters from there or even advertisement companies who display their ads on those websites.

Final Thoughts

While some webmasters do not want to see their content at all on other websites others can take advantage of the fact that content copying websites exist by getting free, valid links from those sites. These sites might also send in traffic to the original site. The number one site that is using our contents is sending more than 3000 unique visitors per month our way.

Webmasters should not worry to much about search engine positions as search engines usually do a very good job of identifying the original site and the copycats. Duplicate content penalties will hit them and not the original site.

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But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.

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Actions can be opening all links in new tabs or windows, bookmark them, copy them to the clipboard or initiate downloads. The function can be set to the right, middle or left mouse button. The rectangle will be visualized with a green border and the links that are selected with a red border. The selected action will be performed as soon as the mouse button is released.

The good news is that Snap Links finally got updated. It is now available directly from the official Mozilla website (and not Rapidshare or other third party sites like before). The developer has translated the add-on to 17 languages by now which is another bonus.

Snap Links is compatible with Firefox 3 including the soon to be released Firefox 3.1. Definitely one of the best add-ons if you regularly work with multiple links that you want to open or download.

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Users installing the software need to have administrator rights to do so and should note that only NTFS drives support the creation which means that it cannot be used on partitions formatted with FAT file systems. It should also be noted that Link Shell Extension is compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The type of link that is created depends on the source that is picked by the user. Picking files will create hardlinks, folders will create junctions and a partition will create a volume mountpoint. The benefit of creating that file system is that files and folders can be accessed in multiple places instead of just the source location.

In addition to the three link types specified above the Windows Vista version of Link Shell Extension supports the creation of Symbolic Links which have been introduced in the operating system.

The creation of remote links within SMB mapped network NTFS drives is supported by the software program as well. The easiest way to get an overview of the capabilities of Link Shell Extension is to visit the homepage which lists all supported modes and functions.

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Most webmasters have the decency to cite their source when they write about a topic that they have encountered on another website which is a good and honest thing to do. Almost all of them on the other hand use anchor names like via or sitename to link back to the website which is probably helping a new blog that wants to establish a name for itself and might help experienced visitors identify the source by reading the name.

It is however not really helping the webmaster who is maintaining the source website.Most search engines (still) rely heavily on anchor names. What you do is you tell the search engines that the source is about via or the sitename but do not give the search engine a single hint as to what the article is really about.

Lets take one basic example. Ghacks writes a post about the latest Firefox update. A brand new story that has not reached the masses yet. Instead of linking to that story using via or ghacks webmasters would do me a much bigger favor by using anchor names like firefox, firefox 3 or firefox update because this would give my article more weight in the search engines.

I have therefor decided to link to other blogs that I cite in my articles properly from now on. The link will contain one major keyword (a keyword can be comprised of one or multiple words) that I have identified in the post on the other website. This will help the other website in their search engine rankings in the major search engines. I will furthermore contact webmasters who link to my articles and ask them if they would like to consider doing the same.

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Websites with thousands of pages make it impossible to manually check links on each and every page. That’s where software programs like Xenu’s Link Sleuth come into play. The software is able to check all links on all pages of a website for broken links and reports them accordingly.

It naturally takes time to check thousands of pages and all the links that point from the to internal and external pages. The software takes good care of everything and offers enough options to configure the link checking process.

The webmaster can enter one or more urls that should get checked for broken links. Those are the starting points and the bot follows all internal links and level 1 external links he can find and reports on their status.

The report can be sorted by status which is also indicated by a color. Green usually means that the link is working while red indicates a broken link.

It is possible to get the properties of every broken link to be able to fix it by either removing it or replacing it with the correct one in case the website the link is pointing to has been moved.

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Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus

An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while.

Philipp Lenssen’s Top Google Apps Tips

Some great tips for using Google’s applications and services like Google Docs, Gmail and search. 

7 Beautiful Themes (Visual Styles) to Customize Windows Vista

As Long Zheng was saying yesterday, “Personally, the idea of using a third party visual style in Vista has never even crossed the mind and I’m someone who wouldn’t think twice about using a custom style in XP.” Even so, there are plenty of nice themes you can try, and Life Rocks has put together a list of what they feel are the 7 best visual styles for Vista. It’s a good list, I wouldn’t really disagree with any of the items on it.

Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution

And some shameless self-promotion from me, this is my article, again on MUO, I spent a fair bit of time researching and writing this one so check it out!

What is rundll32.exe And Why Is It Running?

The How-to-Geek had a great post as always on troubleshooting a runaway .dll through the task manager. He also did a very useful post about useless Vista tweaks on Lifehacker.

How One Would-be Web Friend Turned Into a Stalker In Months

Louis Gray outlines a creepy experience with what seems to be a whacked-out entrepreneur. While reading it you’ll probably find yourself asking the same thing I did; Why the hell did Louis put up with this guy for so long?

The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo

In perhaps one of the best posts I’ve seen Robert Scoble write, he descends from his normal early-adopting, Friendfeed loving position and takes a very real look at an extremely successful service we never hear anything about; Meebo. Did you know they had 20 million monthly users? I sure didn’t.

Why don’t we hear anything about such a runaway web 2.0 success story?

“That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic [as Meebo]).”

…

“If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.”

Some good advice there.

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Once you have quick links enabled, all you need to do is create some custom searches. Now let’s see what you can do here. For example I get a lot of comments on some of my Youtube videos and I like to take a look at them and keep track. However I don’t like them clogging up my inbox, so I have a filter that archives them right away. I could create a filter for the comments, even a filter for comments on separate videos, but I can also search for them, and create a quick link to that search page by clicking “add a quick link” to the side. The major advantage of this method is that you don’t need to create a lot of labels. I find that labels are great for organizing, but if you use too many, it’s the same as not using them at all.

You can use these quick links for much more than just listing comments. Since you can list any search page, why not list all the video’s you’ve received either by attachement or from youtube? Just create a search for these items and add them to your quick links. This can be of great help if you’ve been emailing with a collegue and you know he sent you the traffic analysis, but can’t remember when and where. Just create a quick link to all doc files sent by that person and you can browse through the files easily.

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All you need is a Greasemonkey compatible browser like Firefox, the Greasemonkey extension and the Annotate Links script that adds the functionality. The annotated links are not visible when browsing websites but will become visible once you print the website. Each link gets a unique identifier (number) which corresponds to a link in the link list at the end of the printout.

Only “real” links are added this way to the document. Javascript links or relative links are not included which makes a lot of sense obviously. You can preview the output if you select Print Preview from the menu of your browser, the way the links are prepared and added should be visible there if the Greasemonkey extension is running.

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In my opinion though the loss of privacy does not justify the gain, because in the end it does not really matter that much if you know if someone read the email or visited the link you send him. Tracking users, no matter if its done in large scale by companies or in smaller scale by individuals, is not right. Not for this purpose anyone.

Enough of the ramblings. I’m the last to tell you what you can and cannot do on the Internet. I just wanted to make my position clear before posting the links to the following two websites.

Linkblip and UrlVi are two online scripts that convert links into urls that are tracked much like tinyurl but with tracking included. If someone clicks the links you will be notified by email if you have been using Linkblip or by accessing a page of statistics if you have been using UrlVi.

Both bring fourth another concern that i have. They disguise the original link which is a technique used by spammers as well. Instead of showing the link url www.ghacks.net they display http://lburl.com/dcgdy or http://urlvi.be/rus2k which do not reveal any information about the destination.

I would be very cautious about such a link even if a friend would be sending it to me. My first reaction would be to call, chat or reply to that friend asking what the link was all about.

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I guess the best application for a service like Linkbunch is if you are restricted to a certain amount of characters. Twitter for instances comes to my mind or sending someone an SMS.

The principle is easy to grasp. Just add as many links as you want into the text field at Linkbunch and click on the Bunch button afterwards to create a random link pointing to that link collection. Take a look at one of the links that I have created to get an idea of the concept.

The links themselves are really short, always starting with http://linkbun.ch/ and random chars afterwards. The only thing that needs to be taken care of is that everyone may access those links by guessing the random chars. They seem to be using three chars for the links currently which means a very limited amount of possibilities.

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Let me give you an example to make this clear. If you search for Click Here in Google you will see that the first result is a page at Adobe, to be precise the download page of Adobe Reader. You won’t find the phrase on that website but it still ranks as number one for that term. Why is that ? Because other websites that link to this page are using the keyword Click Here as the anchor text.

And here begins the dilemma for the average webmaster, Adobe could care less because they are a huge company. Lets say you write an awesome article about Windows 7, the new operating system of Microsoft. If someone links to your blog with the anchor text Windows 7 or Windows 7 review you will get a vote from that website for that keyword and your ranking in the search engines might improve.

It actually will improve if you get enough votes. The article is about Windows 7, you get votes for that keyword, that’s awesome. Right ! That’s the correct way of linking to another website because it is helping the other website in the search engines which attracts more visitors that visit that website.

Many websites however use a sites name, or even worse phrases like here, website or click here to link to other websites. Those average terms do not help the linked websites at all. They do not hurt either but they cast votes in a field with a competition in the hundreds of million. Not that helpful.

So, if you want to help a website and write an article about a story that you found on another website you should use a related anchor tag to help that website – that is, unless you want to rank better for that term.

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Some users might already be using the so called Quick Launch toolbar in their taskbar. This is for example the case when you see some icons in your taskbar that open programs like the Internet Explorer or the Windows Media Player. If you do not see the Quick Launch toolbar you can enable it by right-clicking your taskbar and choosing Quick Launch from the Toolbars menu.

This Quick Launch toolbar can be customized. If you want to remove a shortcut you right-click it and select delete from the menu. New folders and applications are simply added by dragging and dropping them in the Quick Launch area.

It is possible to change the icon by right-clicking the shortcut, selecting Properties from the menu and choosing Change Icon there. I have added several of my most commonly used applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, WinSCP3 and Putty.

The second taskbar enhancement are Links to websites that you can add there. To add it you right-click the taskbar, select Toolbars there and choose the Links entry.

Once that is done you can get rid of the Microsoft links in there if you do not use them and drag and drop your own favorite sites to this section. It is then possible to access those sites by left-clicking on them which is a very convenient way.

The last screenshot is showing both my Quick Launch toolbar and my Links toolbar.

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Unplug steps in providing the technology to discover media links for mms and real media videos as well. It is also working for flv files that youtube and google video use but not that comfortable as the video downloader add-on. Once the extension is installed you can use the add-on by selecting Tools / UnPlug to scan the website automatically for media links.

A better option would be to add the unplug icon to one of your toolbars for faster access. To do that right-click a toolbar and select customize from the menu. Scroll down until you see the unplug fish and drag it to the toolbar of your choice.

Most of the time you receive a choice of possibilities that could contain the actual movie. It looks more complicated. Unplug tries to help the user by suggesting one or two of the links that it thinks are the most possible correct links to the movie.  I would use this plugin for the sites that the video downloader is not able to process.

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The Ultimate Guide to Identity Theft Prevention – The internet is full of identitiy thefts and it seems to be only a matter of time until a fake alter ego does some nasty things and you get the beating for it. Good Read.

Ubuntuclips launched – A site that has short videos that teach you Ubuntu Linux. Nothing for the pro, very nice for a beginner.

MPAA Piracy is the outcome of DRM complications – Instead of thinking about DRM they should think about their customers needs. That is my opinion.

Cool HDR images – A collection of some nice high dynamic range images.

45 Things to do when your ISP is down – Pretty funny list, can remember that terrible time when my modem died and I had to wait two weeks for a new one. They actually send me a dead one first and the second was good. Now I keep two all the time, one for backup.

Ok, made it. I know, that seems to be cheating but I promise to do better soon. Have a nice evening.

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Thunda Funda is a nice high quality wallpaper website that is not as ad-infested as most other wallpaper sites out there. Most pictures concentrate on objects like buildings, plants, fruit and tech items and have a minimum resolution of 1024*768 up to 1600*1200. The next website contains a detailed instruction how to construct your own stormtrooper armor. I posted an article about a shop who sold armors but building it itself could be more fun.. if you like that kind of things. What’s with all those stormtropper armor websites that seem to appear out of nowhere ?

Last but not least we have a website called dailyepisodes which is currently experiencing the digg effect which makes the website slow to load, unresponsive and a pain in the ass. The website streams every episode of every season of the Simpsons, Futurama, South Park, Family Guy and American Dad. It probably won’t last long after the digg effect ceases, not sure if this is a legal concept or plain stupidity.. Judge for yourself.

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Partnersites:

AMCP Blog give their impression on the Flock browser, a new browser which uses the same rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox.

Joe from Mybestgadgets reviews some interesting gadgets this week, among them is the Solar Flare Messenger Bag that trickle charges your electronic devices with solar energy.

Other sites:

Economist.com has a story about the battle of the portals, Why Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are fighting over AOL.

Pc Mag published their list of the top 101 websites.

Engadget unpacks the Ipod with Video, short review with lots of pictures.

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