Anybody else rue the day that some bright spark came up with the idea of software to trawl the web, gather content based on keywords, bung it all together and change a couple of words to create an "article"? Of course I can see the benefits of software such as this. Being able to create content in a matter of minutes is like the Holy Grail to webmasters these days, particularly with more and more emphasis being placed on having original content on your website. So, being able to create original articles in minutes with almost no effort required - great? Unfortunately not... In recent weeks I've been purchasing a few articles here and there from various people and firms who have what I would consider a solid reputation - they aren't renowned for being high flying content providers, but should have been more than good enough to provide some space fillers for me whilst I get around to either writing myself a bit more or getting the money together to get a professional firm or individual in. Now please understand that I know you get what you pay for - whereas I wasn't paying $0.20/word I wasn't exactly paying $0.01/word either, so I thought I could at least expect something reasonable. How wrong I was... The first lot I got contained multiple errors - things like "is are", you know the drill, the sort of mistakes that arise from copying and pasting content from elsewhere and making alterations without reading it through properly. It was fairly obvious to me that these hadn't been proof read properly if at all - though there were no squiggly green or red lines in Microsoft Word, they didn't exactly make for elegant reading. Naturally I sent them back and asked for them to be properly proof read and edited as required - I don't expect a work of art but it would be nice if it was at least readable! So, how glad I was when they were returned and looked reasonable at a glance. Further problems only became apparent when I started running them through plagiarism checkers and search engines. Although large chunks hadn't been directly ripped from other sources, there were quite a few matching phrases which started to set alarm bells ringing. Upon further inspection, it looked as though the “author†had taken a single paragraph from several relevant sites, changed one or two words and stuck them all together to make an “articleâ€. In fact, that is exactly what it looked like. In one case, all imagination went out of the window – the bullet-point structure of some information contained within an article looked exactly like the bullet-point structure of the same information on a website. Can you see where I am going with this? Of course the author may have searched for websites relating to the topic and simply read these paragraphs and accidentally written the same information in an almost word for word fashion. Alternatively, and this is what I would suspect given the lack of flow within the articles, some article generating software has been used (badly). The salt was really rubbed in the wound when I was criticised for taking time over proof reading and checking the articles for plagiarism – considering they hadn’t proof read the articles or checked them for dubious instances of duplicate content, I felt this was a bit rich. After all, would you happily hand over the remaining balance when you found paragraphs within your text that were identical to those found elsewhere on the web albeit with one or two words changed? I wouldn’t. I know that there are only so many ways you can phrase things and you are bound to have some similarities – it’s when it looks like somebody has used ctrl-c and ctrl-v to create my “article†that I will kick up a fuss. I would have stuck this in a copywriting section but seeing as though it was a rant aimed at article generating software, I thought it was probably better off here. Anyone else had a similar experience and if so, what did you do about it? I try and give people the benefit of the doubt, and it is a shame because 70% of the time things are fine – it’s just now and again it appears work gets outsourced by firms to the wrong kinds of people and these things slip through the net. Anyway, rant over – anybody else got anything to add? (Other than I need anger management classes and to cut down on the sarcasm and cynicism as it’s bad for my health )