Hi all,

I've spent a few weeks reading everything I could find on this (excellent) board and others. What I'm seeing is that people *generally* seem to be running a relatively small number of sites and working hard on each site to optimize.

I don't see many people running hundreds or thousands of sites, and the impression I get is that search engines are savvy enough to distinguish spam blogs, even nice looking ones with rich (albeit duplicate) content, to the point that scaling to hundreds or thousands of sites is, with few exceptions, not viable.

I'd like to do what I imagine lots of people do, create a lot of sites, throw up content (videos, news, rss feeds of all kinds) automatically, and retire The bottom line as I understand it is that Google and others will spot that a mile away, even if you apply a little creativity.

What intrigues me is that there is always the possibility one can find a unique source of original content, or be a first mover with an emerging technology, and scale it.

I don't have a specific question, though I'd appreciate the thoughts of the experienced on some of the ideas discussed above to see if my newbie self understands the scene correctly. My background? I started a test blog ring which did OK for a bit then got de-indexed by google, my analytics showing a permanent tenfold+ drop after a specific date. Lots of duplicate content; live and learn.