Article Spinning: Please try a little harder

Ernest Hemingway will not be confused with me. Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Catherine Coulter need not fret over losing market share to my feeble online publications. I consume no shelf space at Amazon.com.

As inconsequential as my scribblings might be, some piker calling herself Darryl Henderson saw fit to appropriate my words, sentences, and paragraphs. Evidence points to the use of article spinner software: Darryl's article differs ever so slightly from my original work. A few nouns and verbs have been replaced with logically equivalent nouns and verbs without regard to content or original meaning. Spinning software works really well from the standpoint of the user. Hard work, imagination, and creativity conveniently vanish from the writing process. Simply feed some text into the program, pause a few milliseconds and, if you started with my writing, a set of even more incomprehensible text is generated.

Here's the trick... search engines cannot detect spinning. The original text and the newly spun text differ sufficiently to convince digital computational engines that both are original.

In the interest of padding this article, let's take a look at the 'work' produced by our friend Darryl. Our first clue that she may not be generating original content is the title of her work: it's the same as my title. The title didn't get spun. Had my article been titled simply "Bidcactus", perhaps Darryl would be entitled to a little plausible deniability.

Here is her paragraph:

BidCactus won't let you merely sign up and start bidding. Bidding costs money. Underneath the eBay model, all you need is credit cards and a readiness to bid on wacky stuff. Your BidCactus account is free of charge, nevertheless , you cannot bid on something until you purchase a few bid credits. BidCactus costs 75 pennies to put a bid. Bid Bundles, called "bidpacks" begin at 25 bids ($18.75) and go up to five hundred ($375). There is no wacky products to invest in, either.

Here is my paragraph:

Like Swoopo and RockyBid, , BidCactus won't let you simply sign on and begin bidding. Bidding costs money. Under the eBay model, all you need is a credit card and a willingness to bid on goofy stuff. Your BidCactus account is free, but you can't bid on anything until you purchase some bid credits. BidCactus charges 75 cents to place a bid. Bid Packages, called "bidpacks" start at 25 bids ($18.75) and go as high as 500 ($375). There's no goofy stuff to bid on, either.

The software performed a few basic substitutions:

My spelling errors and improper use of gerunds are sincere. We cannot say the same for Darryl.

PS> I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science and I teach at the college level. Spinning software is technically trivial and would be suitable for a weekly assignment in a first year programming class. Perhaps I'll contrive such an exercise in the future.