Just wanted to throw my 2c in:
I've built a few autoblogs. Some tanked after Panda, some didn't. The highest paying ones I still have are in the $10-$20 per day range, using Adsense.
For the incoming feeds, I use Yahoo Pipes to do all the work. It's really easy to use Pipes and have it make changes on-the-fly to text (spinning), replace words with keywords, and replace products/etc. with affiliate links, as well as remove anything besides the text (...for more info click blah blah... stuff).
Learning Pipes is not easy, but very helpful. Really need to learn Regex syntax to make full use of it.
And, none of my autoblogs have ever caused Google to ban my Adsense account, simply because I leave the title pointing to the original site, basically making the sites aggregated news sites that point to the original authors.
I almost always use a 3 column WP layout (it called SEOAdMax), with a big text Adsense link above all the posts, same color/font, 1 160x600 link on the top left and 1 250x250 image link on the top right.
Hope that helps
J
