I personally do both but on the subject of autoblogs, you have to forget about what other people churn out.
I have seen some utter rubbish due to what appears to be laziness, using the old default theme, rewriting content so its some incomprehensible garbage that people dont want to read, slapping google adsense ads all over the place and so on.
An autoblog that has had a liitle bit of time and thought spent on it can look good, have useful content and folks will come back again and again if they think its useful. I can earn as much with these as manual blogs but there are some topics I do know about and would prefer to write about these myself.