Pageflakes Dabbles in Spam Tactics

As a small time blogger, I obsess about pay very close attention to all activity on my site and I get giddy like a schoolgirl when I get comments, diggs, etc. Recently I received a comment on my post "RSS Reader - What How and Why Pt 2" reading...

"I was wondering why you left out the RSS reader that pagfelakes.com is offering? They just released version 2 and it's pretty good... give it a try and see yourself. Regards, Mikey"

I posted a response questioning whether or not "Mikey" is employed for the nice people at Pageflakes. No response but I really didn't expect one.

Mikey's comment has been in the back of my mind for the last few days and this morning I realized that a little detective work might shed some light. It turns out that Mikey is a pretty popular guy when it comes to commenting throughout ye old blogosphere. For example...

• On Practical Blogging's Aug. 15th Article - "...Other start pages are good too, but I will stick with Pageflakes for now - especially with the new RSS reader feature. Love it. Best regards, Mikey"
• On My Blog-By Ouriel's Aug. 6th Article - "...Of course, I also use the pages for my private needs (you can setup as many private, shared or public pages as you want). Check it out at www.pageflakes.com. Best regards, Mikey"
• On EduGenic's Aug. 6th Article - "...Other start pages are good too, but I will stick with Pageflakes for now. Check it out at www.pageflakes.com. Best regards, Mike"
• On Micro Persuasion's Aug 7th Article - "...Other start pages are good too, but I will stick with Pageflakes for now. Check it out at www.pageflakes.com. Best regards, Mikey"

Seeing a pattern yet?

But wait, there's more...

• Duncan Riley reports having received unsolicited advertising email from Pageflakes.
• Mike Stopforth got the same email!

So, it seems that our friends ay Pageflakes are dabbling in a rather sneaky and unappealing marketing campaign. So I'm going to give a heads-up with a quick...

Open Letter to Pageflakes

Your service - You've got a real nice site. Mobile desktop, RSS Reader, mutiple page option, slick web 2.0, etc. You've got the potentail to give Netvibes and Google some serious competition.

Your Marketing - Spam (Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups) is not the way to go. Spamming your target audience will not go unnoticed and will eventually create a serious backlash.

Your Solution - Buy some ad space. There are many sites directly selling ad space and there are many marketing services that will do the legwork for you (such as AdBrite). Heck, just to show that there's no hard feelings, I'll trade 1 free year of ad space on MY site for 3 months of being on Pageflakes' featured RSS feeds. Now that's a brilliant marketing strategy.