WP-Omatic is a wordpress plugin I have been using for several weeks on another site. Although it is in Beta it is a lot of fun, I have really enjoyed playing with it, and even took the time to make a small donation to the author.
What WP-Omatic does is scrape RSS feeds. It does this on a CRON job, so you can schedule your scrape to run every hour. You then set which categories scraped content is put into… and before you know it you have your very own automated blog!
The current release creates a duplicate of the original rss feed, so, when your target feed / blog updates…. you rip their content shortly afterwards….
Now, this is not a very good plan as you will start upsetting people, and Google will recognise the duplicate content… however, if this plugin reaches maturity it will have re-writing capabilities, so that links or keywords can be replaced.
Furthermore, it would be possible to incorporate a thesaurus into this kind of plugin to extend the rewriting capabilities….
Where this is going is… that you can scrape and rewrite other peoples content automatically… just build a blog and leave it churning out unique content all by itself.
The down side to this is that the rewriting process means articles become less readible and stop making sense, and a lot of pages get dropped by Google shortly after indexing, but, given the fact that the posts take zero effort to create, the fact that some get dropped is not a major concern.
I should point out that when experimenting with this I only ripped my own feeds… no-one elses!!
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Do you find issues with dupe content though?
Yes if someone stole my content I would not be happy, which is why I did not point this scraper at anyone else’s feed…
I am interested in this kind of thing though and will be interested to see what the full version is like.
There are already alternatives to this plugin out there if you want to pay for them.
I don’t think it is that serious an issue for most authors though, as the quality of re-written articles deteriorates dramatically… if you look at sites built in this way they are always low traffic / PR….
It all depends on what you use it for eh?
I’m going to use it to dump everything I do on social sites on my own blog, that way I’ll have my twitter archives, bookmarks, digg history and what not all neatly integrated and archived to play around with.
Yes it does depend what you use it for. There are legitimate uses, like the one you mention. Its a great plugin for things like that.
I think though that a lot of spammers will use it too…
People tend to get very touchy about ripped content – you can actually get stung in the behind these days if they have licensed it properly under Creative Commons.