As I set out to ‘generate’ content in the stealing sense of the word, I started working with tools that are available. These tools work with RSS feeds from the web to form web content. Unfortunately I found out that these tools mostly suck.

For my purpose I used Wordpress and some of it’s plug-ins, like WP-O-Matic to consume RSS feeds and show them on the WP page. This turned out not to be so straightforward.

Update (16 october): the automated test blog traffic is growing very fast: 2000 spider visits/250 uniques/1300 pageviews yesterday. Seems the experiment is working.

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The concept of automating content on sites has always fascinated me. As an ex artificial intelligence student, the prospect of generating content, putting it on a page and actually getting people to read it is very compelling to me.

In the fast paced world of web development, automated content means a lot of things, but it almost never means actual generating of original, high quality content by a computer. What it usually means is ‘generating’ content by mixing some existing sources, which is, of course, not really generating anything but more copying.

Still; it seems interesting to investigate if this really works and if there is any merit to it.

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