Dec

5

I received a comment from Marty Rozmanith who says he is the creator of Wordpress Direct. (I’m taking this at face value, I haven’t verified this and have no reason to doubt him.) Unfortunately it went in my spam queue and I rarely, if ever, check there. Since I believe in open discussion and equal opportunity, I’m posting his comment here for you to read and develop your own opinions.

Hello, I am the creator of WordpressDirect.  I want to provide some facts 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.  Unless you specifically (as an author) post your content on one of these services, it cannot end up being found by our software.

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.  We take copyright issues very seriously.

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 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 piece 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.

Dec

2

I came across this article about Wordpress Direct - a way to set up a blog by automatically stealing finding other content from across the internet. They couch this as a nifty new way to create a "sticky" blog with lots of traffic, but to me it seems like blatant plagiarism. Protecting your content from sploggers is hard enough without this. It also seems interesting to me that they’re building their product off of Wordpress software. I wonder if Wordpress has anything to say about it. I’m not sure there’s much that Wordpress can do about it, as I think it through, because I doubt there are limits as to what you can create using the Wordpress software. And from what I know, splogging is annoying, unethical, but not illegal. Someone please feel free to enlighten me. I’m only speculating here.

However, the idea that they are promoting this as a way for people to easily grab "articles" from web sites interests - and scares - me. Perhaps it’s the editor in me. Does this software cite its sources? When it posts an article on the newly created blog, does it state where the original content came from? I suspect not, but having not tested it personally, I don’t know for sure.

Here’s the original press release about the Wordpress Direct software. Apparently they have 10,000 users so far.

Thoughts, anyone?

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