ethical?

Hi,

I like these discussions.

It depends whether you have pre-conceived ideas about what the internet is, or should be.

Ask yourself honestly, do you?

Then ask yourself who really decides what the internet is (or should be) 'for'? Is it google? Is it the reader? The buyer? The marketer?

Not an easy question is it? But 'natural selection' type theories probably win out in the end.

One thing that I doubt is in question is that the internet is a 'marriage' between technology and humans.

Therefore, whatever your beliefs about right, wrong, ethics etc. you can't have one without the other. What I mean is that you can't benefit from the technology if it's not there.

Before the internet came along, I personally found it almost impossible to create a business that had almost limitless potential. Now anyone can.

So if you are going to take advantage of the technology (which can be done in a myriad of ways, including the very basic 'I can run a business from my bedroom' aspect) then you have to accept the challenges that come with it.

If you feel that the written word is being abused and that it is wrong, then do something about it. Go and show them, by using your unique hand-written content that attracts swarms of readers who by-pass mass generated junk on the way.

If you feel that the technology should be used for mass production, then go and show them, by using it to achieve your aims.

What I would add is that it is clear from participating in many of these discussions that most people who jump on the proverbial 'ethical bandwagon' regarding spinners, have only scratched the surface and are talking about basic word/phrase replacement tools.

If you just look a little deeper, you will find that there is a lot more to it than that and even hardened wordsmiths have found that by combining quality writing with the latest techniques (many of which aren't openly on sale, but have been created in bedrooms and kept in-house) it is possible to get the best of both worlds -

a) deliver quality content

b) manipulate that content to continue to deliver a) above, while leveraging their work to push that content to a mass audience, quickly, while also not raising flags in the search engines/posting venues, by posting the same thing everywhere.

It makes sense to me. Why restrict yourself due to 'ethics' that haven't been thought through properly? I'm quite keen on sticking to my ethical principles, but I also like to create leverage where I can through clever use of technology.

If you read or saw an interview offline by an expert, and that expert made sure to use exactly the same words every time they spoke, then after a while you probably wouldn't pay attention because you would say that they sound like a tape recorder.

But normally (not repeating word for word) as that expert does more interviews, they might find better ways to express their point. They might pick up extra things to say that get a laugh, or include a new topical example to make the interview unique.

Is that unethical? Personally, I don't think so. If it was, then perhaps all experts giving interviews should only be allowed to present their interviews once?

You see, I just made the same point a few times in different ways with what I wrote above

There's nothing wrong with asking about it here. In fact, it's a smart thing to do. But if you want to understand it more, I would suggest thinking a little more deeply about what is right or wrong (and why it is so) and also doing some investigation into the different ways that people spin content.

There's a huge difference between computerized word/phrase replacement and spinning text using spinning techniques which are applied by the human hand.

If we take it away from the extreme (mass 'spamming' of junk computer generated writing) and take it to the opposite extreme, then we would be examining peoples' websites and saying, "You have a 20 page site, but it appears that by saying slightly similar things you have padded out one page of crucial info into 20 pages with the same info, fluffed out with filler. You are ethically challenged." Many people do this as habit in order to target more keywords - same concept, perhaps on a smaller scale.

Often, the reader will never see, or be aware, of the other 19 similar pages. But the marketer is targeting different people making different searches.

See my point? Where is the ethical line to be drawn?

Is it ethical to have multiple different newspapers, TV stations and internet sites all delivering the same news stories with their own different slant on the events? Should we have one standardized news agency and every news source has to copy their releases word for word in order to avoid ethical dilemmas? Who owns the news companies? Are any of them owned by the same company, yet delivering different slants on the stories to satisfy their readers and validate their beliefs?

I think it's fair to say - 'Yes. They do this, in order to make more profit.' It's called 'covering all of your bases'.

It's our job to deliver information, and as hinted at above, market forces will decide whether your chosen method of doing so will ultimately cause you to prosper or fail. But you are in control of how much 'spin' you apply to it - in both senses of the word.