This won't work in 2012. The smart people do not use autoblogging nowadays. They use various content automation methods. As I already mentioned somewhere above, Google itself is a good example of a self-populating site which does not produce its own content. Google just automatically aggregates a 3rd-party content from different sources and shows it to you as a well-structured collection of links, images, videos and other sorts of content you are interested in.
Those who got this simple concept make serious money on self-populated sites. Others continue to buy boring and useless "unique" articles which can't make a surfer to stay at their sites even for a minute. They (the sites) get an outstanding bounce rate and end up in the "Mariana Trench" of the Google SERP's. The main slogan of Google now sounds like: "make sites for real people". The one who gets it right, knows how to make good self-populating sites which will be ok with Google.
In the post-Panda era Google does not care too much about your content (how big your articles are, how many keywords there etc). The most important factor is your visitors' behavior. If they (the visitors) love your site (search engines analyze your bounce rate, on site time, depth of browsing, % of bookmarkers, etc), then Google will automatically consider it "as made for real people" and course it won't remove it from the SERP's. Thus the most important thing is to make the surfers stay at your site longer and come back again and again. Just a year ago it was a common practice to order a bunch of "unique" but boring and useless articles from 3rd-world copywriters and post them to a poor-looking blog with some boring or even default design. Now this won't fly because such sort of site will have an off-scale bounce rate, and site will be automatically penalized by Google as a low quality one.
On the other hand, a well-designed self-populating site which syndicates quality and properly sorted content such as images (there are tons of legal sources), videos (even from youtube and other resources that allow embedding), online games etc will catch the surfers for a long time. And nobody will care if your content is "unique" or not. If the visitors love your site then it "made for the real people".