Garoo

The higher your blog’s PageRank, the cheaper our software. I feel just as dirty as when a moustached plumber is having a booth at the gay fair just in order to target a new demographic.

I don’t even know exactly why I find it so bad: after all, it makes sense to give a discount to bloggers who mention your product. What upsets me must be that Boing Boing is advertising for them, just because the offer exists, which means that all bloggers will suddenly hear of this company, and some of them will relay the information (which I’m doing myself, even though I refrain from posting direct links) just because it’s about blogs. Or maybe it upsets me only because the site is ugly and they have nothing to do with blogs, except for the fact that blogs are fashionable.

I’m all for bloggers earning money (ooh yeah!), and I’m all for offers targeting bloggers. But only if those offers are deserving of us. And we’re not too hard to deserve. All I’m asking for is not to feel like prey, but like an accomplice. You gotta ask nicely is all.

Incidentally, the offer conditions are interesting: if you take them by the letter, what matters is your archive page’s rank (ie. usually an individual post page, which has a lower rank): “You must agree to leave the web page up for at least 4 months, you cannot remove the reference page or move it the dark corners of your web site directly after purchase.” Let’s be nice and assume this is representative of their general misunderstanding of blogs rather than a deliberate intent to screw those who would take the offer. Not sure about that, though.