Call this a disgruntled post if you will, but sometimes I have to wonder if there is a lack of courtesy going on within the blogoshpere. Sure, the “big guns” out there will get a lot (a hell of a lot) dud or spam mail - but what about those who actually contribute an idea or take some time out to do something that may help them?

Someone like me for example…

I don’t know whether you’ve heard about the RSS Subscriber contest between John Chow and ShoeMoney - most likely you have - but either way, the point of the contest is pretty self-evident. Who can get the most new RSS Feed subscribers within a month. I read about it a day or so after it was initially announced, and noticed that Chow was asking for ideas to help him win.

Now it just so happened that I had an idea that was a branch-off from one of my other projects. In a nutshell, I made a wordpress plugin that let me display (in a neat little ajax-powered box) the latest x posts from a blog’s RSS feed. You can see it at the top of this post (or any other) too. It’s nice looking, right? You can download a copy of it at the end of this article.

What better way to promote a blog’s RSS feed, I mused, than to have your readers display your feed for you. Better yet, why not make it into a bit of a gimmick by banning the other side from using it until the contest is over (it was named the Evil Chow edition). I still think it was the best idea to come out of the whole “contest” - I wasn’t offering prizes, but I sure was offering a way to get the message out to as many people as possible.

And even though my mind might not be a finely tuned marketing machine, even I could see that it should be very easy for a blogger with a large readership base to get people using it. All it would take is another round of prizes (and what’s that to someone who brags about making $20k per month - although it might not be worth so much when the USD finishes its slide lol), with winners selected via random for using the plugin on their blog.

There was my big idea - quite simple and innovative (I thought). And I mailed off a pitch (with an update the following day) to Chow, to see if anything would come of it. Now as I said earlier, guys like that undoubtedly get a lot of mail, but having had previous dealings with me in the past (OIOpublisher) that should take me out of the spam / wasite of time to read category…at least I hope it would. But over 2 weeks on, and no response. Not even a “sorry, I don’t see any potential”. I’d have been happy with that - but no response at all, when I had gone to some effort to put something together, was far from courteous in my point of view.

So, I mailed off a similar pitch to ShoeMoney, explaining the idea, where it had come from (including its Chow origins), and wondered whether it was going to be another wasted use of the fingers. So far, it has been. Whether he ever received the email (from the contact form) I don’t know. Whether it was cast aside as a waste of time, again I don’t know. But it would still have been (and would be) nice to have some kind of acknowledgement.

I know that is easier said than done, because email is quite frankly a nightmare sometimes, but I would hope that a more serious email would at least get a glance over from anyone who has a contact form. Otherwise, why is it there in the first place? If the mail wasn’t received, then waking up to RSS becomes an even more important issue.

So there you have it. An apparent waste of time, and a good idea has possibly passed 2 “gurus” of the blogging world, unheeded. I’m not saying it was a stellar idea, but it could certainly have made a difference to one side or the other.

What do you think? Was it a worthy idea to bolster a contest like that?

PS. here’s the download, FeedBlast 1.0

PPS. it’s not all bad news, I did come up with a new idea because of this. Basically it’s a blogging challenge system (using a kind of white-list trackback system, but better). Watch for my next post on blogging innovations.