I’m sure there will be some people who sign up for WordPressDirect who will do so thinking it presents a quick and easy way to crank out blog posts with minimum effort.
Looking through the website, though, it seems to me that the service is more likely to appeal to people who care little for copyright and recognition of the intellectual property rights of others, given that a major aspect of its ease of use is that it will suck in content from almost any RSS feed for republishing.
So no need for original content, for your own creativity and opinion, just set this thing up and wait for it to churn out other people’s stuff as you surround “your†content with ads.
It couldn’t be plainer: spam blogging by any other name is what it looks like to me.
Is that how it looks to you? Love to know what you think, especially if you’re using this service.
(Via Mashable.)
7 responses to “Spam blogging by any other name”
I find it amazing that they try to get away with calling it blogging. It's certainly a sinister model for 'generating' content, and I fear it will appeal only to those with sinister motives, and, perhaps more worryingly, those people who don't know any better. If it was marketed as a tool for keeping track of conversations in a given industry, or around a brand, I could understand it, but not a tool to re-publish existing content – that just feels wrong.
The offer at the footer of their web site made me chuckle – an offer for their 'special report – Secrets of the super bloggers' – surely the first tip from any 'super blogger' would be WRITE CONTENT (then again, the report is probably just other people's content!).
I'm not impressed at all with this service, too many spammer characteristics.
That report made me chuckle, too, written by supposed blogging experts yet I've never heard of any of them.
Neville, this service is uttely appalling and completely against the ethics of bloggers everywhere.
What? You don't know of Doug? That man has a whopping Technorati Authority of … 23! Beat that! You with your laughable … ahem … 334…
[…] accurately, as Neville Hobson appropriately put it, WordPressDirect is spam blogging by another name: “…no need for original content, for your own creativity and opinion, just set this thing […]
Hello Neville, I am the creator of WordPressDirect. I want to set the record straight, since your blog is contributing to the disinformation about our service.
The content software included with the paid accounts does NOT scrape content. It only takes content from sites where people create content for with the INTENT of syndication, such as YouTube and eZine directories. So it basically automates what blog authors were doing manually.
Since the service was launched, we have received 2 copyright violation notices for content, and both were addressed immediately. These were caused by publishers (not our users) circulating content they didn't have permission for in eZine directories, not due to our methods.
Forget the content publishing for a second…We save people time and frustration in setting up a a search-engine optimized blog. Not just any old blog. A blog that would take you a day to build yourself. Worpress experts have said as much on the 30 Day Challenge forum. We just make it easier for a user's own written content to get noticed by Google and Yahoo for your target phrase – and we do it for Free.
People keep ignoring the fact that most of our users write their own content. Why? We and our 30 Day Challenge partners clearly explain why a blog creator needs to create their own unique content in the 30DC lessons.
It's as if we force users to use our content software on their blogs. We do not. We teach our users how to use this software correctly (see the example site at http://www.vintageelectricguitarblog.com) to add value to their uniquely written content on their blog. If it is OK to find a YouTube video yourself and embed it in your blog, is it not OK to have a peice of software to make it easier? Hopefully you see my point.
There are many pre-conceived notions about blogging and the use of such technology, and many are lumping WordPressDirect in with previous stupid attempts to game Adsense.
One rule remains true from that time…
If you spam your own blog, using our stuff or anybody else's you are a fool. You will be de-indexed by Google and then nobody will notice your content.