Do autoblogging plugins make good curation tools?
This is a question I found myself pondering recently after reading an article over at the WPMU blog called How to Set Up a Curated News Aggregation Site with WordPress.
In that post, author Joe Foley makes the case that while autoblogging plugins like WPMU DEV’s Auto Blog seem like spam blog tools (and have indeed been used for that purpose in the past), using Auto Blog for spamming just doesn’t make sense anymore. For one, Google has made that style of blogging nearly impossible to profit from and secondly a spam blog provides no real value to its readers. Both very valid points.
Instead, Joe argues, plugins like Auto Blog – which allow you to import content via RSS (and a lot more) – only reveal their full potential when used as curation tools for niche aggregation sites. He even provided a sample site he made called WPNewser that pulled in content from a bunch of different WordPress news outlets and compiled them all in one place:
But upon closer inspection I wasn’t too impressed with the experience provided by such a site. It felt like about 95% aggregation and about 5% curation. The difference of course being that aggregation is really only the first step in a quality curatorial effort. The latter half involves editing out the fluff, adding context and insight to what remains and in the end providing unique value to your readers.
I didn’t see that in the WPNewser experiment, but I wasn’t convinced that it couldn’t be done…it was, after all, just an example site. So I decided the best course of action was to simply get my hands on the Auto Blog plugin and find out for myself.
Fortunately, I already had the perfect backburner project just waiting for me to test this theory on and bring it to life — a visual arts curation project I began on tumblr that I have been wanting to bring to WordPress for about two years.
My Personal Experience with Content Curation
In 2010 I began a tumblr called The Astonishing Post (or TAP for short). I had recently begun blogging for the international art and design blog Abduzeedo and I needed a place to save all of the interesting material I was coming across during my research for those posts.
Over time though, TAP took on a life of its own as a sort of online stream-of-consciousness art and lifestyle magazine. As a result I began to take it a bit more seriously and I settled into an efficient daily blogging routine that allowed me to follow between 50-60 art and design blogs via Google Reader (feedly now) and over 600 artists and fellow curators via tumblr. Pulling from all of those sources on a daily basis I was able to post a minimum of 50 new blog posts a day and save hundreds to a growing queue in just two hours.
Eventually this type of blogging garnered me a little over 3,000 followers and a fairly respectable amount of daily traffic. In my mind it was time to expand my efforts. I wanted to provide deeper content, more types of content, create a superior navigation experience, create online courses, launch an e-zine, create a shop, email list and a lot of other stuff that unfortunately tumblr just isn’t made for.
So as I looked for alternatives WordPress immediately stood out as my best option. I could migrate my tumblr to a self-hosted WordPress site, re-direct the link or possibly have the two blogs working in tandem, and add all of the features I mentioned above fairly easily. The only problem was that I would have to go from a minimum of 50 new posts per day to about five maybe ten posts per day. And it would take much longer than two hours.
After all, in addition to having to write the copy, download/re-size/upload the images and/or embed the video for a given post, you also have a great deal of pre-publishing, writing and post-publishing steps to take in order to get the most out of each post on a WordPress blog.
Ultimately, I just didn’t have the time. And the trade-off meant that I was sacrificing the only proven source of value for my readers: large daily amounts of astonishing art.
Which is why the thought of using an autoblogging tool for curation purposes sounded so attractive to me. I needed a tool that would help me quickly gather and post the best art from around the web and it looked like Auto Blog just might be that tool.
So I reached out to James Farmer, the Editor-in-chief of WPMU.org, and told him about my idea and that I’d like to try using Auto Blog as a curation tool and write the whole experience up in a blog post. He graciously gifted me a copy of the plugin for this post and I got right to work.
Installing & Configuring Auto Blog
Before installing Auto Blog and blasting my new blog with RSS content, I spent a good deal of time planning out how to organize the feeds that would be getting imported. What are my categories going to be? What are my sub-categories going to be? How am I going to do tags? What is my site structure going to look like? And on and on. Once I had that stuff figured out it was time to begin setting the site up.
Using a fresh install of WordPress and the latest version of Canvas by WooThemes (along with some awesome graphics a friend helped me create a while back) I got The Astonishing Post up and running on WordPress.
Now it just needed more content. And that, of course, is were Auto Blog comes in. After installing it I knew from the the post over at WPMU that my next step would be adding feeds under Auto Blog > All Feeds > Add New.
Here I was able to add, name and configure a great many settings for each feed I wanted to import. I could:
- Determine the post type for each incoming feed
- Set the post status to draft, pending review, or publish
- Set the date for the new posts
- Configure author details
- Assign incoming post categories and tags
- Filter incoming posts by keywords, phrases, tags and/or categories
- Determine the post excerpt length
- Set the attribution link text
- Configure the feed processing settings (such as the type of content to import as well as how often the feed should be imported and when)
- And even set a size on feature images
In this way I added nearly 50 RSS feeds from various art and design blogs around the web. I also went to the Add-ons section of Auto Blog and activated “featured image import” and “image import” so that Auto Blog would get all the images from each post I imported as that’s one of the major time-sinks when it comes to WordPress blogging.
Now it was time process the feeds and get some content on my blog!
Auto-Curating: The Pros & Cons
After clicking the “process” button under a couple of feeds I spent the next several hours sorting through the content that Auto Blog was able to import in just a few minutes. I was really impressed with how quickly it pulled in over 50 posts from multiple blogs. Now the challenge was picking and choosing which to keep and which to delete. And after that, getting down to the business of formatting, annotating, and scheduling/publishing.
Instead of narrating all of that in detail I thought I’d just give you a quick pros and cons list I came up with during that process.
Auto-Curating Pros:
- Importing content is fast! If I had processed all of my feeds I would have been able to quickly import over 1,000 posts in about 15-20 minutes.
- Automatically getting all of the images from each post is awesome. Downloading, resizing, and uploading images can be a major time-sink. Since my theme dynamically resizes all images that are too large for my post width this feature was a big time saver.
- Being able to set post status as draft or pending review is a must and Auto Blog made it super simple.
- Assigning each feed to specific categories and tags was a plus.
- Getting the full post text was a nice option because when I went back through during editing I could keep what I wanted and delete the rest. As opposed to just getting the first paragraph or something like that as a post excerpt.
- Being able to manually process each feed instead of it having to be automatic every X hours or minutes helped me avoid becoming too overwhelmed.
Auto-Curating Cons:
- Importing everything from every feed, even when manually controlled, was way too much. It made for a lot of unnecessary deleting of posts and images I didn’t want or need.
- Videos did not import/embed properly.
- Virtually no features aimed at aiding the curation process, i.e. selective importing, annotations, quotations, etc.
My Conclusion: Are Autoblogging Plugins Good Curation Tools?
In my humble opinion: No. Not in their current form. But they could be!
While my list of pros above is longer than the cons, the weight of the cons are greater than (or at the very least cancel out) any benefit gained by using an autoblogging plugin for curation. It’s not that the plugin performs poorly in any way, it’s more an issue of it only aiding in aggregation while providing virtually no tools for curation.
What this means for users is that if you’re pulling from a lot of sources you are going to have a ton of posts and images you don’t want to use. And yet they all get pulled in anyway when you process a feed. Which means you’re then going to have to go through all of those posts (either side by side with an RSS reader like feedly for a reference or by previewing one post at a time through WordPress) to identify the posts you want to delete. And after you delete the posts you don’t want you also have to delete the redundant images (which can be quite a time consuming process in and of itself).
In the end, it was just as time consuming for me to delete everything I didn’t want as it would have been for me to skip the import altogether and do everything manually.
But it’s not all bad news for autoblogging plugins looking to re-shape their image as curation tools. There are two features they could add to Auto Blog (or any other autoblogging tool) that would make them pure gold for bloggers/curators like me: a new and improved Feed Preview Mode and Selective Import option.
What would these features look like in action? I imagine they would look a lot like Google Reader. Take the image below for example. It’s the list view of a Google Reader feed. Why not include something like this in the plugin? Instead of processing everything in a feed why not make it possible for a user to click preview, browse through the posts available and star or check off the posts they want to import before processing?
Those features alone would sell me 100% on autoblogging plugins as curation tools. Beyond those two features though, I can imagine a whole slew of mind blowing options that would make any curation blogger’s wildest dreams come true, such as:
- The ability to highlight multiple sections of text in preview mode that would import as block quotes.
- The ability to annotate in preview mode.
- The ability to add image titles and alt-text in preview mode. Ideally once and then have the rest filled in sequentially. Ex: Nathan-illustration-1.png would be put in once and numbers two through however many images there were would be filled in as both title and alt text for all imported images on that post automatically.
- Automatically imports existing audio/video within an iframe shortcode, resized to a pre-determined setting.
- And I could go on…
Now, I’m not saying that it would be easy to add features like the ones I’ve imagined above to an existing autoblogging plugin. All I’m saying is that in my opinion, it would take some big changes like these to justify the re-classification of these plugins from strictly aggregation, affiliate marketing or even (yes still) spam blogging tools into truly valuable curation tools.
Final Thoughts
I had really high hopes for this experiment. I really wanted it to work out. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve been sitting on this project for about two years now and I still haven’t come across a single plugin that does everything that I would need it to do in order to keep my daily blogging time on The Astonishing Post down to a manageable amount of hours.
But it’s not a total wash. I got to test an awesome aggregation/autoblogging plugin, provide some constructive criticism and write a fun post for the community here. And since The Astonishing Post is now live, I went ahead and experimented with some other methods of content curation for WordPress blogging…and I think I found something pretty promising – hint, hint. But that’s a topic for another post.
In the mean time, what do you think about my test of the Auto Blog plugin? Have you used an autoblogging plugin for curation before and if so what did you think of it? Do you have a preferred method of curating content for your WordPress blog? Let us know in the comments section!
DNN
Of course this can work. If you look at the bigger picture. this can help keep site content updated even while unattended from your PC. If you’re one of those dedicated content creators on the go with a laptop and speech recognition, this’ll help improve natural SEO and build deeper relationships with your target audience. Don’t you agree?
Marceel
Excellent article about the pros and cons of using an RSS import tool. I myself have tried this out and also spent HOURS cleaning up the posts and images that were imported. Some content was good, but most content was fluff. I wish I read this article beforehand.
I’ll continue to build out my hip-hop news site Memo310 dot com, but finding a better solution to curate and share articles around the web is my priority. Its tough running a newspaper type blog without an automation tool. I hope to find an RSS solution that will help me find the jewel articles and scrap the rubbish.
Kayla
Habe mich jetzt erstmal über EU Fahrzeuge informiert und denke, dass es wohl eine gute Alternative ist, so wie ich das gelesen habe. Wenn die Ausstattung passt, warum nicht?
Finance Tips
Dear admin,thanks for your great writing on content duration.I am thankful to Google that brought me here on this post.I have a question-
I like to build a site in Bengali language ,will this plugin help me to build such a site?
Elijah
Hey Nathan,
A great blog post my friend! I’m grateful you took the time to really write out some thoughts, because it got ME thinking (and digging) to find a good solution for a particular blog I have in my network.
I ended up finding this: http://curationtraffic.com/products/curation-traffic-plugin/
Not really for what I need (image based blog) but looks like it may have the tools to filter out the junk, and quickly add your own content to make it unique.
Alas, the search continues!
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Ryan R. Bayne
Nice article.
I’m the author of CSV 2 POST an Easy CSV Importer. I kept changing my plugins, re-developing them from scratch. All because I have very long term plans for them and it includes being good at everything mentioned.
I’m a strong believe of involving the community in the process of auto-blogging and other users of the same plugin. I have a lot of ideas on how to use a network of like minded people and visitors to a site to fine-tune the permanent content published to the site.
A lot of work is involved though and I’ve re-developed my plugins over and over again seeking the perfect foundation before continuing. I have what I need now. CSV 2 POST version 8.0.0 was released just the other day and it has everything it needs to now move forward.
I agree with you on just about everything. Hopefully one day my plugins will change this though and you’ll change your answer to yes.
Adam
Mate, your plugin saved my life so many times 😀
Felikss
Hi Nathan!
It’s an very informative article! But in my opinion, content pulling is only half of autoblogging. How about automated sharing?
I think that when you finally setup your incoming posts and 99,9% of them are good quality, it’s time to add auto sharing option.
I’ve completed fully automated wordpress autoblog which automatically pull content and fully automatically share your blog posts to the specified social profiles/pages. Maybe you are interested in to check it out? If yes, just search in Google for “AutoBlog Grid Theme”
One of Cons you can strip out 🙂 “Videos did not import/embed properly” – I’ve created video autoblog and I use WPMU DEV autoblog plugin, videos import/embed correctly and my autoblog is 100% responsive. In case of problems try to contact plugin developers, there is very good support and I sure they will solve the problem.
Also, share your thoughts with WPMU DEV Team, it is possible that they will implement your great ideas!
Jaime
Thanks for such detailed article!
Did you have the chance to test other similar tools like
WP-o-Matic or WP Robot?
unni
I am looking at various options with wordpress to created a curated news website. I have a well curated feed with me so the problem of unwanted posts accumulating is kind of solved.
Does using the auto blog feature screws up the SEO capability? Does worpress allow monetizing through google ADs. ( Pretty new to this stuff, so please enlighten)
Dennis
I’m impressed with the creative use of the AutoBlog plugin which is usually associated with spamming. At least so far in my experience.
When you first mentioned it in the post, I wanted to navigate away immediately. But then, when I saw how you mean to use it… Impressed.
I think it can be used, not only for news aggregation sites, but also as a general “research” tool to gather all the articles on the topic you plan to write about, and then use some of them as a reference in your blog post, or for furnishing new ideas.
Phil Hill
Here’s how you solve the problem you are having with being saturated with too many posts. It’s simple to add a “curation layer” for you content before it gets to your wordpress site.
Funnily enough this whole wordpress curation angle was something we looked at http://flashissue.com before focusing on content curation for email newsletters.
Step 1: I add all my favorite feeds to Google Reader under the a group called “Flashissue Faves”. I then created a tag called “fave posts”. Google Reader provides you with a sperate RSS feed for any tag or category.
Step 2: Plug the Tag feed “fave posts” into the Auto Post Blog plugin on wordpress.
Step 3: Browse the aggregated posts on Google Reader (or Feedly as i now use), tag them and they will now automatically result in a new blog post on your wordpress site.
It’s a a few minutes each day to go and tag 5 or 10 posts.
phil – ceo Flashissue
Nathan Weller
Hey Phil,
Wow, thanks for pointing that out. Adding a tag and then using that RSS feed instead is a great idea. I’ll have to experiment with that some more and see if I can make it work.
Right now though I’ve settled on a method that cuts out the auto import altogether. For me it makes more sense to use Feedly to identify the posts I want to blog, tabbing them all out in my browser, and then blogging them to wordpress from their source using “Press This”.
It’s old school so to speak but it avoids common RSS issues like truncation or smaller images, or not including video etc. My next post is actually all about it so I hope you’ll stop by and check that out too.
Best,
Nathan
Phil Hill
yes, i like the press this feature as well. it makes larger volume curating hard but it works well if you want to add commentary.
I wish feedly would allow the creation of RSS feeds around tags (what with GR shutting up shop).
look forward to you next post.
Mathew Porter
Not ure what sort of impact this would have on a sites SEO with the recent Algorithm updates to Penguin and Panda with duplicate content etc, but that would be a nice experiment in itself.
Nathan Weller
Well I can already tell you it’s not going to do your site any favors. Not unless you’re adding a significant amount of original annotation or introductions/reviews to the pieces of content you’re curating. But if you can make your site useful then I don’t think it’s a bad idea to lean heavily on social shares and referrals in general for your traffic.
Delwar
Curating content can be time saver when you have the idea to rewrite the summary for yourself. Otherwise just copy pasting has no differences than curating. So, whatever you do, mix it up with original posts and curating posts.
Mark Tilly
Tim, you should check out MyCurator on the WordPress repository – it does almost all of the things on your wish list. It brings in articles from any feeds into a private training page for ‘preview’. You choose which articles to post and you can edit/annotate/add commments using the WordPress editor – and you have the full text and images available for quoting/excerpting.
MyCurator also uses an AI technique to let you train it on the articles you like, classifying the ‘firehose’ of articles into good and bad. You can find out more at http://www.target-info.com/
Tim
Hi Mark,
I’ve looked at MyCurator in the past – thanks.
It looks like an interesting plugin, but we’re specifically avoiding using any form of auto-curation on The Descrier, so we wouldn;t use the vast majority of the more interesting features of the plugin.
Mark Tilly
Hi Tim,
We have been and continue to move towards focusing on manual curation in our releases. We’ve added Ajax for speed, multi-author support, beefed up the WordPress edit page to easily curate with the full text and images and added an admin page that shows all of the articles found in a nice list format with multiple actions, popups and bulk manual curation options.
Our vision is that curation is just part of the whole content creation process and we aim to become more of a writers tool than a pure curation platform. I hope you keep your eye on us as we continue to expand the product. Thanks
Nathan Weller
Mark,
In the process of creating this post I downloaded and tested the MyCuration plugin too. I didn’t include this in the article above because I wanted to keep it more focused and adding another tested plugin would have made it quite a bit longer.
I really do enjoy the curation specific features you’ve added above and beyond simple aggregation. Unfortunately, two things still remain problematic for me: too many posts are pulled in when pulling from a large amount of RSS feeds and too few posts are pulled in when using the topic filters. It’s possible that I’m simply curating a difficult topic for automated tools of any kind to help out – Visual Arts. Most posts on this topic fall under a massive number of categories and subcategories while having very little text (letting the work speak for itself) which means I’m either getting a massive firehose of posts or missing some good ones by mistake.
That said, I think you have the most promising plugin for curation around right now and I would definitely encourage other curators to at least give it a shot. I know I’ll be keeping an eye on future updates.
Best,
Nathan B Weller
Mark Tilly
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for taking the time to try out MyCurator! I agree, keywords can be a very ‘heavy handed’ way to filter articles, especially if there is not a lot of text.
To get around the keyword problem, we included the AI based training and classification features. I’m not sure if you had the time to try them, but if you train 20 or so articles as good or bad, it can make a big difference. Our clients have found that 75% or more of the articles are Not classified as good after training, providing a much reduced firehose of content to work through.
Thanks again,
Mark Tilly
Tim
At Descrier.co.uk we use a variety of tools to aid with the curation of pieces from our sources to go along with news and editorial written in house.
I have been wondering about WPMU’s plugin here, so thanks for the review. We’ve ended up hacking together a bookmarklet loosely based around “Press This” to aid with quicker curation, but importing images are still a major time-suck, so we’re always on the lookout for new tools.
Nathan Weller
Hi Tim, thanks for reading and commenting. It seems we’re in a similar situation. I’m wondering, if you were to improve the “Press This” bookmarklet in order to really make it a powerful tool for curators what would you do? I have some of my own thoughts (which I’m in the process of writing up) but I’d love to hear from another curator.
Tim
Hi Nathan,
We have full licensing agreements with our various sources, so we are in a slightly different position to a lot of curators. But for us, the ideal Press This bookmarklet takes all the page content, title, URL, blog name, author name, tags, and image details and puts them directly into our customised post editor.
Getting most of that is easy enough, but to be honest I’m at a loss what to do with images here. We have to make sure we can license the image anyway, but it would be great to save a few steps.
I look forward to your post on the subject!
Anisha
Hey Nathan, thanks for sharing your experience. I am also in similar situation, your article is very helpful in clearing my doubts. I have one question how to tackle duplicate content in auto blogging. Doesn’t it affect your site ranking? Also if you can suggest any solution. thanks in advance.