My experience with iWriter

I've looked this service before but never really had a need for it. But after a week of being so busy that I didn't write any posts I thought it would be worth a try. Maybe I'd get lucky and just get a quick post online with little to no effort.

So last night I signed up and put the minimum of $10 on my account. I put in a request for a 500 word blog article. I gave them the keyword that I had already researched, and a description of what I was looking for. Cost was only $3.

Within minutes it was picked up by a "writer". You'll see why I put writer in quotes in a minute. I let it sit until this morning. When I got online I had a note that my article was ready for approval. I wasn't pleasantly surprised. It was actually pretty crappy. Apparently their "writers" use something called spin tags. From what I can gather there's a huge database of phrases. You put in your keywords and tags and then the system spins those into an article. So no one actually wrote anything for me directly.

Some of the grammar was weird. Some things were out of date (web sites that changed names). But mostly was utterly lacking in any feeling. Completely dry. I kept a little of it, but mostly it was just some ideas for me to use to build up a better post. The 500 words that I bought turned into 1250 by the time I was done with it.

The biggest value of the $3 is that it gave me a starting point and push to get writing. I can edit and improve all day, but starting with a blank page is the most difficult part for me.