Friday, May 25, 2007

Artificial Intelligent Software to Classify Online Article Authors

Is it possible to use artificial intelligent software to study authors and writers by their writing? For instance use such tools to find anomalies on Blogs, Internet Forum Posts or searching for human experts by their authored works.

There have been a few interesting programs that can predict is a writer is male or female, but they only work sometimes and not a high percentage of certainty, "Gender Software" and it is far from full proof. The error rate is too high to be viable and such a system can be gamed too easily.

I do not doubt that the project developing such AI software to classify online article authors would be difficult. Yet, I also know it is a lot less difficult once you start and play around with the data a bit, right? And we know it is possible and after working with it for a while, I bet we could improve accuracy, because "We are Writers" with significant attributes, so we are already well within the domain and therefore our ideas and expertise is very much needed if we are to achieve success in this project.

Will we also be able to catch the "bottom feeders" as one top online article writer calls them? He is speaking to the plagiarizers, computer generated article writers and posers. Well I believe we can catch most all of the Plagiarizers now with a little extra work, with very few false positives, although it might happen occasionally.

Computer generated articles, we can catch now, but someday that will be much harder. The Carnegie Mellon crowd already uses there little AI programs to go onto forums and have conversations and can fool most people for a short time period, some people for longer. Key wording bandits, yes they are a problem and with such software they may become very obvious very quickly with such a tool.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Online Article Titles - Use a Question

It is widely known that questions make good titles of articles, but did you know that it also makes a lot of sense if you are an online article author to be heavy handed on using questions as the titles of your articles. More than one top online article recommends this tactic and strategy.

As a prolific online article author myself, I believe this to be an excellent point and I have thousands of articles now which start with questions, because I know that many people type questions into the search bars to find answers. And I know that when someone asks me a question and I have the answer that there are millions more with the same question.

Thus it makes sense if you are called upon as an expert to answer a question that you take that question and your answer and make it into an article to help people. The Internet is perfectly set up for that too. When you use this strategy you are killing two-birds with one shot and you will find that your article gets read a lot by Internet Surfers who would most value the information, as it answers the exact question that they are thinking of while searching.

The goal in online article marketing is to attain high quality targeted traffic and therefore is stand to reason and makes common sense to use questions as the title of your articles. I can attest to the fact that this strategy works because I use it and I am often rewarded by Internet Searchers who later thank me for answering their questions.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Article Generation Software is Not All Good Part I

The debate as to the pros and cons of article generation software is still alive, even after Google's published policy on duplicate content. Article marketing is a popular means of driving traffic to your website, and if you are unable to write articles properly, you have three options. You can hire a ghostwriter to write them for you, you can purchase packs of articles on a wide range of niches, or you can use software to generate them.

Article packs come in two kinds. One is compiled from scraped articles: these are articles taken from article directories, complete with author's resource box, and bundled up into packs of up to several hundred or even thousands. Not only do these bleed relevance from your site due to the authors' website links, but also there is little if any control over the number of people purchasing these packs, so duplicate content is a serious issue.

The second type of article, either original or private label, where there is no author resource or link, still comes with the problem of duplication unless you rewrite the articles. Purchasing article packs is therefore fraught with danger and could harm your website. Which brings us to article generation software.

The major problem with most of the article generation software available online is that of contextual relevance. Such software tends to use templates into which keywords are put by the software. In the early days the templates were very general, such as in this short passage:

"Information on cat baskets is available all over the INTERNET. The subject of cat baskets is so popular that anybody requiring information can easily obtain it on the NET. Cat baskets WEB sites are very common and if you want more information on cat baskets you can find it on the INFORMATION SUPER-HIGHWAY using the keyword cat baskets in any search engine."