Use Google Alerts to detect if somebody is copying your Blog

It is not uncommon to find somebody copying your content, and the hard fact to accept is that you may not be able to do anything about it. The internet makes it so very easy to find and copy content that you may be fighting a losing battle in trying to prevent people from copying your content. As an example, a RSS feed provides your content (partial or full) to anybody who can receive this RSS field, and even if you were not providing access to a RSS field on your blog, there are many other ways to get RSS updated content from another blog or site.
The recommended process is to find who all is copying from your content, and then try and get that content removed from all those sites where it is being copied (by corresponding with the site owner, or through a complaint to their host, or to Google Adsense if the other site is running Adsense). The question is, how do you detect whether somebody is copying your content ? There are many tools available (commercial or free) available for this purpose - Google Alerts is one of these tools that can be configured to send you a periodic report (link to Google Alerts site).
What are Google Alerts ? Learn more at the FAQ (link)
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page).
What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?
You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for?
Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.
A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

So, define one string that you believe is getting copied, and update that into your Google Alerts page.

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