Here I was happily creating a new piece of content when my friendfeed of alert system went nuts! 
A blog I follow religiously, received a press release from WordPress Direct. Based on that press release, they asked their readership what they thought of WordPress direct.
All hell broke loose.
I’ll let you read the comments and make your own judgment. For the record, I wanted to put my own thoughts here on the 30 day challenge blog.
I think the posters that accused WPD of creating spam blogs missed the point completely. At first glance, I can see where they’re coming from. Just a bit of research and actual understanding of the purpose of the software I think most non-biased viewers would reach the conclusion that I have…
I think WPD is brilliant, here’s why;
It’s common knowledge that our lab headed by Rob Somerville played a huge part in the development of WPD. What excited us about WPD was its ability to create a website in a few minutes without any training whatsoever. This made it perfect to the 30 day challenge!
Over 10,000 people since the WPD was launched during the 30 day challenge have created Blogs with the service. Let’s just review what we actually taught people to do with Word press direct…
We talk people to use WPD to create just ONE blog. This blog was niche based and selected after extensive market research. It is true we use keywords to create the blog - not for spam purposes but to make sure the categories and content are going to be relevant for Google.
And this is what I think created the confusion.
It is true, if the system allowed you unlimited access (and it most certainly does not) in theory you can create hundreds of spam type blogs. doing this however, would be both pointless and stupid.
I repeat, the absolute best thing about WPD is its ability to create a blog so simply even an absolute beginner can do it. We proved that in this year’s 30 day challenge when thousands of people created their first-ever blog.
It’s also important to point out that we taught people to create ONE blog. At the 30 day challenge we hate spam more than anyone. However, any tool, no matter how useful, sadly — can be used for both good and evil.
It was because of this, a number of safeguards were built in to WPD to ensure that anyone who tried to use it for spam purposes would be very quickly and brutally shut down.
The first layer of protection comes from Google itself. Duplicate content rules were bought in for a very good reason. Anyone just ripping off content and placing it on their blog deserves to have the wrath of Google showered upon them.
In the 30 day challenge, we INSIST that people create their own content. Sure, we make sure that they monitor news feeds and other sources to get inspiration and ideas. We certainly do not encourage people stealing others’ intellectual property. Not only is it morally wrong, it’s just plain stupid.
What a lot of the people discussing the mashable article would not have seen is the limiting of the number of blogs that can be created in any given month. This was a very deliberate move to ensure that someone trying to use the system — or should I say game the system — would be wasting their time.
But as they say in the classics – that’s not all.
The team at WPD conducts manual reviews of the blogs created with its system. Again, try to game the system and WPD will shut you down.
It is true, WPD blogs do very well with google. This is not through trickery or dare I say it, gameing the system. It’s using Googles own data and their own suggestions to implement a push button blog. While the creation of the blog is a pushbutton process, just like any other blog it’s the effort, market understanding and good old elbow grease that will determine the blogs success…
And that’s how it should be.
Ok, sad but true…