Auto blogs don't work - but twitter does

I've been working with various "pipes" situations, rigging aggregators and whatnot in order to acquire and utilize data. 

A few notes on this:

Google Alerts piped to Blogger eventually get shut down. Usually the Google Alerts just disappears. Once I got a notice that Blogger thought one of my blogs was a "spam blog" and so I shut it down myself.   Apparently content that is only built through Google Alerts can be considered a "spam blog" but one which has human-edited content originally isn't.

Google Alerts piped through an imaginary friend on Friendfeed to Twitter is a success - as well as mixing it in with other news RSS feeds. I've got an imaginary "http://twitter.com/joethunk" which was developed simply to give me news feeds and an alert which is all the "how to's, learn to's, and ways to" which show up on the web. This has over 466 followers as of today. I imagine if I put a babe as an icon, it would get even more. Just the way life works. But its right now the content which is valuable to people.

Using Alerts to pipe to Friendfeed and then using that RSS back to a blog (probably a WordPress plugin) would be the next approach. A direct Google Alerts to Blogger using a mail-to approach leaves the header in, so is easily worked out. When those alerts go through Friendfeed, that header disappears. Posting it on a Wordpress blog would be a workable auto-blog. While Google could lower it's rankings, it couldn't stop it as it does with Blogger.

Now, if you could do that with a video feed, you'd be really popular, depending on how you themed it...

All for now, a couple more posts to do elsewhere. 

Oh - remote blogs do work, you just have to watch your subdomain names and not directly "take over" trademarks.  Research shows that adding "blows" or "sucks" after a tradename is legal.

Auto-blogging - care of wordpress

How to get other people to write your post pages - without server strain.

After being shut out of my hosting for a domain (because cheap hosting is cheap hosting) when my WordPress installation twice bogged their server, I've become more careful.

The idea hit me (and their are several good plugins for this) is to use this blog as an aggregator, so that it goes:

1. RSS feed is collected,
2. Is brought to blog
3. converted to posts
4. new RSS feed created

And then I thought - no, that would make this server have to work, with cron jobs and whatnot - the database work on top of that might be too much and I'd be off my new server (same cheap webhost) for good.

But, as the mind churns, I then thought that I could get Google to do my work for me. Google Alerts sends you email and WordPress allows you to post by email (as does Blogger), so:

1. Google Alert scours and finds data from various posts.
2. Sends email to blog
3. Blog converts these to posts.
4. New RSS feed created from the aggregate.

Of course this needs testing.

But think of the applications. Create a free blogger host and then have Google Alerts populate it with posts. You can then collect these posts' RSS feed and funnel this to Friendfeed or Google Reader as an aggregator, by type, author, subject - whatever you feel you need to organize the data.

Needs a test. But should be doable.

Sub text of this is that for a regular blog, you will build up posts and so content. If these then post directly to categories and not your front page, and if you also have Google sitemaps installed, it becomes an auto-content generator. Probably won't ever rank high on SEO, but on the other hand, it might at least send your links some link love.

Best reason is to have computers do your aggregating and digesting for you. Especially if you can get free blog platforms to do this. Have to try this out with some older blogs... nice way to revive them.