Forum Moderators: not2easy
I'm new to writing content for contents sake and the pessimistic side of me has to speak up here. Writing articles or content is hard work. It takes time, research, creativity and more time. I think it's fun. I'm not a pro, but I'm practicing. Anything that bears fruit requires work, or at least I thought. I'm also a musician. It took a long time to really be good at performance and writing music. There was no software that took the work out.
So here is this article wizard that creates original articles from snippets of many articles across many sources. Should I just give up now? First, would my original content compete against all the mashups that are churned out in 1/10th of the time it takes me to create original content? Second, won't all my work be "snipped" and used through this software eventually?
It seems like everything I take on, someone comes up with a way to cheapen it and make it so anyone can do it. I guess that is progress...
Don't worry about people using such programs to do the same to you--sites with good original content will get the incoming links that make you rank well in search engines. Sites with scraped content will not. Plain and simple.
Writing articles or content is hard work. It takes time, research, creativity and more time.
I think you made your own case right here to not use the software. If article writing were easy everyone would do it and have dynamite content on their site. Since as you say above it isn't easy is why the site's with the best stuff are the ones that have the most traffic and produce the best income for people.
Should I just give up now?
I would...have you no pride? Golly gee, the best part of what we do is WE DO IT and others do not. Can't imagine any SOFTWARE as smart as user Billy Joe and Bobby Sue...or any webmaster wanting to look cookie cutter copy of the MFA's out there.
Don't get me started...
It seems like everything I take on, someone comes up with a way to cheapen it and make it so anyone can do it. I guess that is progress...
Don't be so sure about that. I just got a call from another developer in Texas who came across my web site and after reading my portfolio called me to do a fairly big SEO writing job. We are working out the details of the agreement now. However he told me a story that should lay this thought of using software to the curb for good.
He said he hired another "writer" that simply took the material they had a on few of their lead generating sites and dumped into one of these automated programs and gave my potential client back the garbage this software spit out. He said it was terrible, it was unreadable and didn't make any sense to a person that would read it. He got rid of her pretty quickly.
It is good to know that computers and software haven't completely replaced what humans can do :)
That, is exactly how you'd put into layman's terms the research of a lot of people working in content aggregation and summarization over a lot of years :)
It doesn't work properly yet, although there are some really interesting projects out there and some really cool systems.
An interesting thing to consider is sentiment. If you're trawling through all sorts of articles for info on a particular topic (a keyword phrase), you're going to bring up things written in a positive and a negative way. This can turn your summary into quite an interesting read!
Definitely don't go with that software.
Read a bit about the technology companies propose to help you decide if what they're proposing is viable, and also it'll give you some good questions to ask them so you can evaluate them fairly. SUMMARIST is probably the oldest summarisation project. Inderjeet Mani has done a lot of work in that too, he's probably your expert here. And Wikipedia is always a good resource :)
