Sometimes a product starts with a good idea, then it becomes monetized into something that ends up not so good.   Today I was sent a link to a online product called Instant Article GhostWriter.

The product is being made to appeal to people who don’t want work to find material to write articles and post them on the web - by scraping the content of other articles and blog posts and assembling the pieces into one file where you can edit them and make your own article.    

I can send anyone who wants it a test report.  

I’d love a tool that did pull not just the sentence - but the surrounding text from information I was looking for and told me the source of the data.  Because Instant Article GhostWriter does not tell me how it gets the data and where it gets it from - I would not use the product for any serious work (it probably makes good blog writing more difficult - not easier, because you actually have to work harder to organize the information than if you found it yourself -and all this information is just going to fragment your thinking - not organize it).

Think of it another way - you come to a blog to find out information - and a point of view - and the writer takes the time to collect and think about the information.   To just scrape the internet for related sentences and then a write an article on it insults the intelligence of the readers who want real information.

It reminds me of blog spam sites that are being created and harvested for their SEO value - to create rankings.  Techniques like that might work for a short time but the Search Engines already figured it and are filtering that kind of backlink out.  Yet I’ll see alot of backlinks from commercial sites going to blog spam sites (I looked at this issue for the World Resource Center last month focusing on house plan sites).

Shortcuts to real thinking, real work, lead nowhere good.  Stay away from products like Instant Article Ghostwriter unless the offer a real value to the creative process.