WorkinWords Comments and occasional rants on agribusiness and other topics – mainly New Zealand

Now I have seen everything. I happened upon a site advertising a program to generate new versions of any article by substituting synonyms and other useful phrases.

The advertised program was US$77 so I was not inclined to invest. However I did try a couple of freeware programs that purported to do the same thing.

The first one required you to supply your own synonyms or alternative phrases throughout the original and format them in such a way that the program recognized them. Once that had been completed the program generated numerous article by randomly mixing in your synonyms and phrases. Thus you were the proud owner of a whole series of articles that were completely different. Fancy that!

The second program was a little more sophisticated in that all you had to do was to go through the article to nominate the key words or phrases and it generated a list of synonyms or useful phrases for you. I tried it and it worked like a bought one – each article was different and definitely not a copy of the first one.

The only minor hitch is the possibility that the noble sentences composed for the original article can still turn out as utter nonsense or complete gibberish if the word or phrase combinations are not compatible. A lot depends on the time you put in to choose the words from the lists supplied.

I now realize how some freelancers are able to churn out 100 articles on any given subject, for which they charge peanuts; they just write one article and use a program to generate a whole lot more. These are generally classified as article spinners.

But, if the sample I tried is anything to go by they are going to be producing articles that may comply with the requirement to generate 500 words on a topic with several key words liberally sprinkled throughout the text, but which read like a thesaurus.

Of course there may be an up market program that recognizes that it is churning out rubbish and does something to rectify the problem, but I have my doubts.

I learned today that I should blog more often to attract readers to my blog and to spread the word about my services – so I will have to do just that. The advice also indicated a list of topics one could write blogs on. It all goes to show that these guys who advertise for bulk articles are presumably looking for bumf to insert on their blog sites to generate traffic.

Their requirements are that the articles be written in excellent English and that they are capable of passing any plagiarism test as decided by running it past the Copyscape program or something similar.

I understand there are programs that will generate articles containing specified key words – but the likelihood is that the grammar is nt up to scratch and the content is mostly garbage.

I wonder though whether many surfers are going to return to a site that basically carries bullshit.