Imaginif

The winner of Imaginif’s Cash for Christmas competition alerted me to a new blog promotion website: RSS Hugger. Sounds like HMS Lugger. My father was an Army Officer in charge of Small Ships - we grew up on the water in boat crazy Papua New Guinea. Not a sea faring gal myself (scared of crocodiles and sharks - have you seen how BIG their teeth are!) I still do tend to think in nautical terms - RSS Hugger sounded like a boat name to me….or was it perhaps a tree hugging hippy circle who had gone all trendy and embraced social networks in cyberspace??? I didn’t have time to read about it because I was too busy doing what I do with child protection and child safety. But, the more I visited my daily reads, the more I noticed my blogging buddies were talking about rssHugger. Umm, this was probably something I needed to sate my curiosity on.

Idiot for not engaging curiosity sooner! Child Safety and Child Protection fail to be trendy, sexy or highly searchable terms. Imaginif’s mission is to make child protection more palatable, acceptable and like butter is to bread - something that everyone spreads daily. Duh! Naturally, we need some viral assistance in spreading our butter and promoting our bread.

rssHugger IS a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs around core subjects of interest. It is somewhere that child protection needs to be! To be considered for acceptance into rssHugger, you must first do a review of the site (like I am doing now and like the ones I’ve read on my friend’s blogs - this virus is going to spread baby and there’s no protection so may as well get it now and build up your strength). There is an option around NOT doing an rssHugger review post - you can pay a one off “in lieu of a review” fee of $20.00. Once you have posted/paid, a human checks and clears/rejects you for immigration to the free world of rss visits and hugs.

The site offers a Top 100 list that appears to be worked on rssHugger page views (hugs) and is updated once a month so that everyone has an opportunity of climbing the list. Even though each blog is reset to zero on the 1st of every month, obviously the earlier your blog is listed at rssHugger, the more curiosity and learning hugs (aka hits) you are likely to receive and therefore the higher the chance of gathering hugging friends and remaining on the top 100 list month after month. For example, top of the list is MixedMarketArts.com (with 224 Views and the blog of rssHugger founder) and the last on the list (number 38, which may mean there’s only 38 joins that have been indexed so far guys - rss feeds reads at 217 though) is finance-portal.co.uk (with 1 View). Interestingly enough, the 1 page views kick in at only number 17. Everyone is reading MixedMarketArts.com because that’s the blog that comes up on main page and the natural curiosity keeps increasing the page hits, ensuring this blog stays at number 1 on the top 100 list. Clever marketing.

My view (as rss unfed and uneducated as it may be)  is that this may well be a worthwhile and equitable site to join. All it has cost me is a review. My review though does come with a disclaimer - I am reviewing the site so that I can have my blog included in order to see how the site works, spreads and affects my blog through the blogosphere. Again, a very clever marketing ploy by rssHugger founder. Well done to him.

Long live child protection (aka “please Mr rssHugger, can you help increase the popularity of child safety and grant me some protective play at your house?”).

Edit: Mr rssHugger heard my request and granted me a protective play pass. This is my rssHugger page that you go to in order to hug me. Thank you for approving this child protection blog, Collin.

Other rssHugger reviews:

John Chow’s rssHugger giving out free hugs
Cerebral’s Because I need hugs
(here, give her a hug)
Sueblimley’s I am an rssHugger
Joh’s I’m a rssHugger