@atlantarobin I have never used an auto-blogging software and personally wouldn’t do so as the stuff I’ve seen hasn’t impressed me much. 

If you’re looking for a way to post at a certain time, you can set a publish time on a Wordpress site. 

As for content/help with your posts I would personally go to a service such as http://www.iwriter.com (a 300 word article is only a couple bucks) and have someone write an article for you.  I use this as a guideline and then re-write in my own words to put the exact spin on it (for me it’s easier to re-write than to get started sometimes). 

@atlantarobin I’m pretty sure I wasn’t one of the guinea pigs…I had a couple writers who “wrote” (term used very loosely) for me and then I found someone who did well. 

@adigaskell
For good or bad, things have changed. Trust me, the people that really invented the Internet never imagined their technology being used to purvey porn or being used for cyber-terrorism, etc.. Just like the Internet started out just as tool to transmit academic information more easily and effectively, blogs have evolved to become more than online diaries and journals for SERP purposes; especially since browsers somehow lack the muscles or attention spans to move beyond the first couple of pages of search results.

@adigaskell I empathize and agree with the sentiment of what you’re saying, Adi. At first, I must admit I wasn’t quite sure where you were coming from. I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of reading your musings and a bit of your heart on your blog to better understand what you meant. I’m so glad I took that time.

Simply put, I loved your blog. I admire your unique ability to ever so lightly embellish the mundane with such delicate cerebral flourishings. All at once I had to remind myself whether I was reading passages from a novel or from a simple product review — and of a YouTube Slam Jam, no less. I envy that transformative style and work on improving my own daily.

I especially liked the passage where, although you weren’t fond of the juvenile gamification of cutesy animal videos and the like, you saw a positive use for gamifying idea generation to prevent seniors in a firm from squelching creativity generated from the rest of the company’s workers — a much more meritocratic process. Hope I spelled that right. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing here and from hours old memory at that.

So please forgive this essay, but here’s the landscape from whence I come that perhaps your own writings can best illustrate for me. In my request above, I want specific automated tools — like a computer, instead of a pen; like a Mac, instead of an Apple IIe; like a database, instead of index cards — that can help me free up more brain time for idea generation, while getting repetitive physical, non-cerebral, and peripheral tasks completed faster. Right now, those mundane tasks have declared seniority over my brain, take too much of my time, make me lose focus during the writing process, and squelch my creativity. Obviously, I need a more meritocratic system that supports creativity when writing.

I’ve been working on a self-systemizing experiment for months now, freeing much brain time for narrative creation and improving flow-through threads in the most mundane of assignments, all in order to engage readers, no matter the writing task. So now I’m looking for automated tools to help me with something very specific.

For example, instead of relying on memory or unreliable cut and paste methods for copying your exact phrases to quote from your blog, I need a computerized tool that would lay your blog page with the YouTube Slam article side by side with this reply window on Social Media Examiner’s site. That way I wouldn’t have to waste time going back and forth copying and pasting. On a Mac, that is a time drag, very slow. In this case, my copy/paste function screwed up and I just resorted to substandard paraphrasing from memory.

On a daily basis, having an automated blog tool would free up more time and make my quotes and paraphrasing faster and much more accurate. That would also allow me to reference more relevant sources and give readers more of what they want and need from me.

When I first started writing, all I had was a pen and paper. I was a lousy writer. Then came the jammed up QWERTY keys designed to slow me down and the long loud waits in front of AP wires clacking out the world’s news in mere dribbles. The early 80′s brought me the first known Mac among all my peers and I spent years raking in the money that automation and desktop publishing afforded me at that time. The 90′s brought me autism, a 24/7 unpaid invisible job, and the realization of how precious every second in life really is.

Thank God for automation. Through the years, it most certainly helped my brain think more clearly, helped improve the quality of my writing enormously, and vastly cut down on the time it took me to write, edit, and submit a piece of writing for approval. It also helped me and my family survive autism.

So today I’m just asking for a little help finding a blogging tool that works on a Mac — a brain assistant, just another writing assistant, if you will. And if it will run on Apple’s upcoming hydrogen battery, then that would be ever so nice, too.

So, Adi, in all good spirits, I promise I won’t use it for search engine gamification. Honest Abe, I won’t! But please, pretty please, I’d appreciate your support in the search for this little old lady’s most wanted little old blog automation tool. From my heart to yours, my simple little request comes with a big old lol, my new eloquent friend.

@adigaskell Thanks for the link. Zemanta looks like a useful plug-in, similar to something I use to us. I’ll try that.

@kristi-hines
Thanks for that image, Kristi. That’s helping me visualize exactly what I want to express more clearly.

Imagine an interface where an RSS feed delivers published articles containing your keywords in a window at the top half of your screen on demand. At the bottom half of your screen is a large area to type and edit your 100% original article. You use the top half to bring you research, background, sources to interview, quotes, etc., so you can accurately quote sources, copy product information, get author info, etc., all with correct, complete, lawful attribution.

It’s the interface I’m interested in. I finish writing and editing my story and put it in a feed to post to my blog at a time I want it to post. I then write my next story, using research, background, etc. from feeds in the top of my window, put in a feed to post at a certain time and go on to the next one.

I understand the term “auto-blog” upsets some people, but I don’t know another name for it. I also know that AutoBlog Samurai was capable of scraping and posting in the unethical manner you described, Kristi, but I never used it for that. I don’t care what others do with it, I care about finding that kind of interface where searching, research retrieval, writing, and posting is all done within the same interface

@louisdagosto I’m not a fan of article spinning.  I’ve seen a few in action, and they never sound legit.   Of course, I have different business goals.  Since I’m a freelance writer, I wouldn’t want someone to stumble across a piece of writing with my name on it that sounded a bit off on quality.  Also, I’m curious how you spin one article 250 times and set up blogs for a year?  Or is there more to it.  

Also, please use the full URL for your links and not cloaked, Bit.ly URLs.  It’s fine if it is an affiliate link, but let’s make sure everyone knows what site they will be going to if they choose to click on it.  :)

Maybe this forum should be named the blackhat blogging forum.  I mean seriously.  The same article re-worded 250 times???  Your actual users must really love you.

@adigaskell @kristi-hines

They never see the articles. They watch my videos.

I use screen flow and will set up videos on my hosting. Usually watching my computer screen and being able to follow me along is a lot more efficient than reading a “how to” anyway.

Users are usually trying to reproduce results and create leads for their own business.

On the other hand… I love working outside of the IM nitch because it allows me to connect customers with products who are looking for a product anyway. Pulling in leads with specific search keywords is what drives free traffic isn’t that the point of SEO lol.

If I actually had a “written blog” and was trying to pull in readers, I would gather my traffic the same way and create squeeze pages to my blog.

Back to my original quandry….

I used to use Market Samurai for keyword research, but something happened and it froze my computer screen every time I used it, so I stopped.

Well, I fixed it a few days ago, or either it fixed itself, lol… and today I went back to review some of the video training MS had to offer.

Lo and behold, I rediscovered the Content Finder and Promotion tools there I had used before when searching for content related to my writing subject. Just as I had remembered, it found content related to keywords, gave helpful rating and ranking info for articles, videos and photos using those keywords, and had a writing space you could use to write the articles, then promote or distribute them to different venues, sites, directories, and forums.

That was my little bit of automation that I had previously found useful, but totally forgot about because of the “freeze” problem.

So glad I started this forum, and glad for the robust, if diametrically opposed discussion. It’s funny how a difference of opinion can trigger your brain to keep thinking about a subject long passed the point of original interest.

But the vigorous opinions expressed here kept my brain coming back to this. Bottom line, I now have my bit of automation I needed to help me speed up my writing tasks, thanks to all your input.

But for the life of me, I still keep reflecting on Adi and Louis’ diametrically opposed views on SEO and automation. I see both viewpoints so well and understand both, from both a writing purist standpoint and that of an internet marketer, as I pursue both sources of income.

I know Google is fast putting an end to the methods of seo that Louis mentioned, but not for the reasons most would suspect. While Google doesn’t like seo, as they see it as gaming their system, they still put out detailed directions on just how to search engine optimize your sites and pages for Google SERP, so they obviously help perpetuate the practice, as it is, indeed, a necessity to survive and thrive in Google SERPs.

But what’s trumping everything, and will do so even more in the future, is the rapidly developing, even overwhelming need to provide relevant information to smart phone mobile users, whose numbers will dwarf desktop and laptop users if they haven’t already.

The need for relevant, timely geo-targeted information by this crowd is trumping everything online, including and especially seo-based practices.

The result is that long, detailed, original, and truly helpful information — the kind that Kristi creates when writing all her articles, many from 6,000 to 10,000 words, on her voluminous unique-content-packed site — are what readers and users want to read and use, so Google is rapidly weeding out the rest, with spun seo articles and thin sites being the first to disappear from search results altogether.

But on some levels, and for certain needs, the thinner one-topic sites are still needed, though you won’t see them around at all in the next few years, no matter what anyone thinks. I’m thinking this may not be completely good for anyone, even if you don’t like the way they’ve been created.

Fact is, I know if I’m looking for info on certain products, especially online downloadable products, I don’t want to read volumes from one writer. I want to read short, pithy information from a bunch of sites, and I don’t want to wade through volumes in a big, fat site to do so. It serves my need.

I’m just sorry that that won’t be available to me in the future. I can forgive all the crappy, spammy junk online, but take away my ability to read a pithy one-pager for my own specific purposes and I truly end up the loser. And I know Google doesn’t want that for me, but it does look like the highly targeted, if not spammy and redundant looking, mega-seo sites will soon disappear, nevertheless.

Anyway, thank you all for your input here. I always love a rousing and robust discussion!

Robin Carlisle

Robin Carlisle