I’m a bit obsessive about checking my site stats every day, which when you consider the minimal traffic I get through here probably comes across as either desperate or sad (or possibly both). The wonderful Feedburner people enable me to not only see how many people follow my RSS feed, but also see which search bots and crawlers have been poking around in it. Today, I just discovered that I’ve been crawled by a site calling itself LinkieWinkie; there was an address appended to the crawl, so out of curiosity I webbed on over there – it’s always interesting to know who’s checking out your content.

As you’ll see from the link, it’s a pretty minimal site that doesn’t let on much about itself, but indicates that it’s some sort of web marketing experiment. When the word ‘altruistic’ cropped up with the statement that the site ‘likes to be talked about’, my traffic-whore instincts were piqued. The other posts the site links to all seem to be fairly in the dark as regarding what exactly is going on, but some kind of reciprocal linking malarkey seems to be the order of the day, even if you link to it without knowing what the hell you’re doing it for, and stating that as honest fact.

So, obvious copy-clown that I am, I decided I had nothing to lose, and have hence linked to it myself. Just goes to show that simply reading Steve Rubel’s blog every day isn’t enough to let you know the length and breadth of the internet marketing world…I’ve had a Google about, but no-one else seems astonishingly up-to-speed on this particular meme/scam/ploy/phenomenon. Suck it and see, I guess. It appears to just be a proof-of-concept gig for some SEO guys with an axe to grind. Who am I to argue?
So, if LinkieWinkie has shunted you here, feel free to poke around. Velcro City is all about science fact, science fiction, technology, futurism, and general leftfield weird stuff. I hope you’ll drop by again sometime soon. Fellow bloggers – check your feed stats, there’s something strange going on. I might drop BoingBoing a line…

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