Tier1: Spun content or duplicate content, what would you prefer

Yeah but the link above is probably talking about this forum.

Some people will argue that he is the owner of some of the best spinning tools on the web so he's a bit biased, but he has never to my knowledge publicly come to this forum and disputed the argument against the person(s) in question. Nor did he post the following study here.

But I have to agree sort of, I made a similar statement several years ago when TBS first came out.

That being said the only thing that I'd add is that it's not cr...p articles that are automatically spun. You're talking about spending several hours just to spin one article on the paragraph, sentence and synonym level MANUALLY. Incidently some spun articles I did were actually accidently submitted to, and accepted at ezinearticles.

If you only need several articles to put on your site it's much faster and better to simply rewrite them. But if you need hundreds of articles for web 2.0 sites, article directories, backlinks, etc. spinning them will save you an enormous amount of time. But you have to do it really well, or I wouldn't bother spinning them at all, only the title, resource box and anchor text.

For article marketing for something with my name on it I'd manually write it. But for SEO purposes a spinner used well comes in handy. JMO