Auto Blogging
In the Advertising Revenue Website article, content cost was covered. This article examines auto blogging as a means to create content at near zero cost. There are moral and legal implications with auto blogging.
Auto blogging refers to the automatic generation of content for blogs, or more generally websites, as opposed to manual creation of articles and posts. Web scraping is a related term with broader scope where page content, data and information are harvested from the web, to be used for one's own website.
Without getting into the specific details on different technologies and software to acquire content, it is sufficient to say there are moral and legal grounds which are being discussed, tested, challenged and litigated.
Creating content from RSS feeds may be considered an acceptable practice where articles and posts are aggregated for a particular topic. Copying articles from article websites without removing creditation and links is a generally accepted practice. Bad and/or illegal practices include removing author and links from the scraped content, and worse yet putting in false credits. It then becomes a proof of ownership challenge.
CMS (Content Management System) software such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla being popular blog creation platforms offer plenty opportunity for auto blogging software providers. There are various plugins for the major CMS platforms. Content may come from various sources such as articles sites, Clickbank, YouTube, Ebay, Yahoo Answers, Flickr, Yahoo News, and Amazon.com.
As is typical with all things Internet, the offerings will come in flavors of free, paid, free for basic with paid enhancements, etc. In addition to providers of auto blogging capabilities, there will be those selling advice as well as tools to prevent auto blogging.
Philosophically, auto blogging may be considered an oxymoron. If blogging is about the expression of the blogger, then how does auto fit in? Especially since it is automatically extracting other people's thoughts and writings.
