Bloggers

The fascinating thing about bloggers is how seriously many of them take themselves. I have been treated wonderfully by some and like dirt by others. Exchanging links, for example: some folks will swap links if you ask. Others want to check out what you're writing. That seems fair. Others won't even answer an email. And we're not talking about famous published authors, we're talking about people who's only claim to fame is their blog.

Mistress Matisse will not be sending me a Christmas card. She did send me a nasty email about "spamming" her because I had sent her a virtual press release announcing Beyond You & Me hitting the 40,000 visitor plateau. Now, I get notices like this, and don't think too much about it. And since MM and I are both in sort of related fields (sex), well, I figured she might even be interested in exchanging links. But I suppose I shouldn't expect politeness and flowers from a professional dominatrix. Scary stuff, but who am I to judge?

Now, I understand when people come to you with offers to link to sites that are wildly inappropriate to mine. Because Beyond You & Me is partly about sex, I get offers from porn sites to link or even join their affiliate referral service. For those of you who don't know, an affiliate referrer sends traffic to your for-pay site. If they sign up, you pay the referrer a commission. I'm not particularly interested, and so I don't know if I should write the porn sites back, or ignore them. The former risks sounding conceited, the latter risks being rude.

Not sure which is the lesser of two evils.