I never noticed it before, but now I see a lot of people mentioning automated blogs. My guess is that these sites just read RSS feed(s) from other site(s) and just put it into their own database... Is that correct? If so, how on earth is that allowed?
If you use adsense you can get banned for doing this. Google also does not like it for search engine use either. Alot of people do it and use software hat makes blog posts up daily they never even log inot blog it does all the work.
Interesting, Why does Google disapprove of something, that clearly the writter or source of that article wants propagated through out the net, with their RSS? kinda dumb by G.
I use a wordpress plugin that gives the original author full credit for the post, meaning that it states their name and links back to the original poster. If the original author is quoted then it's fine.
As peeg says, as long as full credit is clearly given, it's OK. It's not much different than social bookmarking where everything is from other sources. The only difference is this is automated.
Automated blogs are pseudo link farms. As long as these don't post to each other - the link farm label goes away.
It's all duplicate content and impossible to get any traffic for. It's an old no longer used black hat technique that probably worked well circa 2002. There are far easier and better ways to go about setting up automated sites these days.