Inside Scoop

As one of “Australia’s Top 100 female bloggers” (their words, not mine; I guess I’m on a list somewhere), I received this invitation today:

We would like to invite you to join our new site: A Pampered Life (”APL”) which is an online community, where you can share your knowledge, experiences, tips and advice.

A Pampered Life is brought to you by Naprogesic (period pain meds — Ed.). There are many great blog articles to read and to comment on such as: health, fashion, travel, relationships and much more. A Pampered Life also features the latest events. You can also add your own events, upload photos and enter great competitions.

Each month there is a new theme. The theme for June is financing for women in relation to financial year end. There are great articles on budgeting, financial goal setting, and much more.

We would love your contributions and stories to A Pampered Life. Please find below an editorial calendar for the next six months and a consumer press release.

By joining our community you will be able to gain further exposure for http://www.thebargainqueen.com/ via links to your site from A Pampered Life. You will also have the opportunity to share your thoughts and advice with like-minded women.

So, I can write about what you want, when you want, to help you promote period-pain meds, and in return I’ll get some links from your site — which has a PageRank of 0, <100 incoming links and an Alexa traffic rank of <3,500,000, but will apparently help me “gain further exposure”. I don’t think so.

But wait, there’s more:

As one of the top 100 female bloggers in the country, we would greatly value your contribution to our new community. Similarly, if you like some of the articles we have on our site, feel free to reference our content on your blog with a link back to APL.

So… I get a sort-of compliment (you’re popular, please be friends with us), and I’m supposed to be so thrilled that I’ll give you lots of deep links into your site. Again, not going to happen.

Naprogresic, wake up: if you really want to get into Web 2.0, why not buy some ad space from those “top 100 female bloggers” you so admire and support us in our work? You’ll not only get a much warmer reception, but it’ll likely cost much less than building and staffing “the first Australian online branded community for women” (according to their press release).

Of course, that would mean giving up control over the content and letting those top female bloggers determine when, where and how they are published — instead of “giving women the opportunity to take some well deserved time out for themselves” on a period pain meds site, with a pre-set editorial calendar that assumes all women want get-fit tips in spring (so they can look hot in swimwear by summer). It’s like the movie Mean Girls: “on Wednesdays, we wear pink”.

Australia isn’t technologically backwards in general — technology adoption by individuals is high and we have some very smart, albeit basically gagged, academics — but boy do our big businesses give us a bad name. When two companies (Woolworths and Coles Myer) control 70% of all retail sales, who cares about innovation?