[myNetWords.com]
When Ducanben suggested we should have a definition of "autoblog", I thought this must be a perfect example of tautology, because a blog is, by definition, something you do yourself that doesn’t depend on anyone else. I just didn’t get it – and I still didn’t after my online searches took me off down another blind alley ("autoblog" is also the name for a blog devoted to cars). Finally, though, I discovered that “autoblog” is the word for a new generation of blogs that has caused quite a bit of debate on the web. An autoblog is a blog whose content is generated automatically. Instead of posting entries to feed your blog, all you do is pick up posts published on other blogs, or even videos appearing on other blogs or websites. Technically, it’s simple: all you need to do is integrate some RSS feeds into your autoblog. For example, you could integrate the RSS feed for Mynetwords into your blog, so that each time there’s a new post on Mynetwords, it will be reproduced on your blog. Just by relying on RSS feeds, you’d have enough to keep tens or even hundreds of autoblogs fed, given the amount of content available online.
Autoblog
Updated : Thursday 10 May 2012
The autoblog can be a good way of monitoring particular topics. If you’re interested in the environment, you can pick up the RSS feeds from all the blogs and websites devoted to the topic and centralise them into one single blog, which gathers content from different sources and might thus be of interest to all those who share your passion for the environmental cause. But people were very quick to realise that the autoblog had other, much less laudable, uses. Some have used them as a way of maximising their advertising profits: by appropriating the content of other blogs, they can set up dozens of blogs, all with links to each other, which, in theory, enables them to boost the traffic on their blogs and charge more for their advertising slots. Some webmasters use autoblogs as a search engine optimisation (SEO) tool, in other words to maximise the traffic on their website or blog. They create one or more autoblogs having some vague connection with the subject matter of their website and put in a link to that site, in the hope of increasing its visibility. But this method is not without its risks. For one thing, some autobloggers have had to shut down under pressure from other bloggers who have complained about them stealing their content. Some have gone to court to get an autoblog closed down. Bloggers are mainly quite happy to have their posts relayed, but not at any price; the blog (or autoblog) must be of high quality so that their content is not discredited, and it has to include links to the original blog on which the posts appeared so that people will refer back to the original and the traffic is genuinely two-way. Obviously, too, the content used must be "free" of rights (see creative commons content). Even if the autoblog doesn’t attract the wrath of the blogs it copies from, it can still be sanctioned by Google, which treats autoblogs the same way as "Splogs", in other words as spam. If that happens and the blog is taken down, the blogger might as well kiss goodbye to his advertising revenue.
What’s more, Google is constantly refining the algorithms it uses to detect autoblog abuse. We must hope they will not end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as these centralising “gatherer” blogs can be quite useful when they are properly done and used as a tool to monitor a particular topic.
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