Hi Wiehahn,

>Any
>idea how often I should post new content to the lenses and
>my other silver properties..? If frequency is an issue,
>should I use some automation method to take some time out of
>the process...?

Mix it up. In the "real" world, the vast majority of sites never get updated. Update the sites that are the easiest to update, specifically through automation.

Don't get caught up thinking you have to update every site every day.

I wouldn't worry about updating most of them at all.

Others should only be updated a 1-2-3 times a month.

Some once a week or so.

Others every day or two.

Do what you can do without driving yourself crazy thinking about it.

>My questions really relates to the process of automation and
>using RSS in particular. Access to content as far as I’m
>concerned is not really a problem. Spinning this is not a
>problem either. The issue comes in as to how I can automate
>this process as far as possible. I’ve seen Kelvin’s thread
>on Blogbot, and it would appear that this is a good piece of
>software to use in building WPMU sites and posting to them
>content spun by Tuelz....? That leaves me still with the
>whole concept of the other platforms such as blogger,
>livejournal, etc. Any software recommended for this...?

Funny you should ask...

I've been spending my time recently trying to learn something that will let me address this issue.

Basically, I'm not a programmer and have had to rely on others to make stuff. I'm trying to learn how to make some of the things myself, so I'm in control.

I don't want to get more specific until I'm sure I can do it. I'll go into more detail in a day or two (or 3 or 4).

>Swiftly on to RSS. I see the whole idea behind an RSS
>blackhole. This makes sense. My only question on this is, if
>there is a way to use the RSS blackholes to populate my blog
>network with content. The issue being as my feeds are
>updated by the RSS blackhole, it moves down over time and
>contributes to the whole link decay problem. Is there a way
>to circumvent this and use the blackhole as content...?

Actually, this is why the blackhole can be very powerful. The real benefit of RSS is when your RSS items get picked up by other sites (usually scrapers) and they create links to your site from their blogs and pages.

But to get the "numbers", you need to constantly update your RSS pheed. The blackhole kind of cheats at this, and is a blackhat technique.

Think of a blackhole as an old "doorway page" creator, except the pages are in RSS format and not html format.

And yes, you can use the blackhole for content...It may be just as beneficial as a "content spinner" which you can use to add spun content to a network of RSS friendly sources.

A more simple "blackhole" is to add alot (100s) of RSS items of your own to BlogBomb, then call the results using the "random" feature. For this, take your "chunks" and convert them to RSS, with each chunk being a paragraph of info that can stand on it's own.