To date I’ve been quite polite to all the people who have approached me to run competitions for bloggers to write review of restaurant review sites. I haven’t run any because I don’t believe bloggers are the people who will mainly review on these sites.
The thing about this blog is that it is my copyright content and if I’m going to spend time writing for the web I want more of reward than the slight possibility of winning a prize. What I’m interested in is spreading my content through RSS syndication to build my profile and audience and to keep my content here in one place or in my aggregated Friendfeed.
When I participate in commercial restaurant review sites I’m helping them make money from my writing with no reward for me.
Tim Hayward on The Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog has some sensible words to say on this:
“The big food boards used to be a place to find vibrant new food writing, now they’re filled with the same old suspects having the same conversations over and over again…Why have they stagnated? Because technology has moved on. The good writers have left now…to set up their own blogs and most of the readers have followed them. Nobody needs a community to pull them together when they have RSS.”
Hayward says that he doesn’t go to online guides anymore:
“…like most people I go to Google, which in turn gives me half a dozen great blogs, better writing and a more realistic spread of opinion. Funnily enough, the reviews I enjoy reading, once I’ve been through this process, as often as not come from old school, professional reviewers whose opinions are couched in quality writing and, now they’ve caught up with the technology, are freely available on the web.”
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