That's what happened to all the biz dev folks

First they came for the email, and I did nothing. Then they ruined the search engines, and I ignored it. Then they came for the blogs and there was no one left to stop them.

Thanks to a combination of over-inflated Google pagerank of blogs and article after article extolling the virtues of weblogs, I've been getting email and snail mail from a steady stream of hucksters, all related to this site.

Today I'm supposed to tell you that Vonage is now supported somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Michigan. As much as I love the vonage service, they really need to fire their clueless PR firm that sends me press releases (as attachments no less!). Also, a couple companies have propositioned me to seed my blog with links to their viagra hormone penis breast enhancement pills. From $7 per link (says the spam company that is headquartered in a tax shelter in Bermuda -- that's not too much of a red flag) to $30 per link, per month, people are offering to pay me to help them abuse google and make their site go higher in the ranks. I wonder how many actual takers they've gotten. I've gotten a couple free music CDs and a few books from publishers. Now, I had no qualms about getting free stuff, and I'd be happy to mention these titles by name if they were good (honestly, I would talk up good books no matter how much I paid for them), but to be honest the quality sucks. What's the protocol when someone puts you on a band's "street team" and the music is overproduced fluff? Is it ok to stay silent on the crappy books I got from a publisher, books that have nothing to do with the web and were painful to read after a few pages?

My favorite is the database software company that makes some plugin to a database software package. It adds functionality I would never need to a package I don't use. And I got followups to the first exciting press release. Why hadn't I mentioned it yet? Here's another press release! Have you mentioned the last exciting press release yet?

To all the hucksters: shine on you crazy diamonds. You've made my email amusing again.