Does anyone use tools to automatically refresh web pages, like save the file to update the time stamp? Does google consider this type of techniques as spam?
I don't think Google will think that an article at the same URL will be new just because of a new time stamp, so you'll just be wasting your computer's time in altering the time stamp. Many content management systems automatically create articles with new time stamps, so Google had to learn to ignore that situation a long time ago.