Meet the Rehashed, Remixed, Warmed-Over Web

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That "Read more" bit and everything that followed it was generated by Tynt's system.

So far Tynt has tracked nearly 20 billion words and 20 million photos that have been copied and published elsewhere or inserted into e-mails, leading to an additional "tens of millions of new page views per month" for those sites, Ball says.

Even better for Web publishers, Tynt lets them see not only which stories get copied the most, but which parts of each story are most popular. (Invariably, it's a juicy quote.) Savvy publishers can then tailor their content to be more "quotable"—and thus, a better read. You don't have to be a big publisher to use it—any blogger can sign up and use the tools. And did I mention this service is entirely free?

Tynt is in beta now, but Ball says he's hoping he can build a profitable business around aggregating the data that comes with this knowledge and selling it to publishers—similar, in a way, to how BigChampagne tracks music and video file swapping data and sells it to music and movie companies.

The Big Caveat, of course: This works only if people who "borrow" your stuff link back to you. Though Tynt's technology auto places that link into your e-mails, blog posts, and so on, it's easy enough to delete. Once the link is gone, so is any benefit the publisher might receive from someone copying their content.

Worse, though, are the thousands of sites that rehash content without ever directly quoting from it. They're still getting a free ride—and appalling amounts of traffic for doing next to nothing. My sincere hope for the new decade: That these worthless copycat sites begin to wither and die as readers discover they're truly not worth anyone's time.

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