This post hurts a little bit, but I gotta do it.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I don’t agree — I think money is the sincerest form of flattery — but imitation is right up there.
A couple of months ago, I heard from some of the people (including the owner) at one of the bigger commercial spanking websites. They had noticed Spanking Blog, and wanted to know a little about what I was doing. They were curious and interested. We talked some business, exchanged some emails, and so forth. They wound up buying a banner ad, and I put up one of their affiliate banners on my spanking toplist and other places. Good business, productive exchange, yadda yadda.
Time passes. Then what to my wondering eye should appear, but a new spanking blog run by the owner of the company. First post: less than a week after the exchanges with me. And what’s it called? “The Spanking Blog.” The domain name? It’s “thespankingblog.com”.
I’ll be honest: all flattery aside, it made me grumpy. These guys have a well-established brand they could have leveraged, but instead, when it came to choosing a name or domain, they settled for imitation. I’ve emailed the owner, and we’ve had a frank exchange of views, and he of course doesn’t see it my way (although he’s frank in crediting me with prompting him to realize that there was an untapped market for his products in the blog world.)
But here’s the real kicker: He’s doing a damn fine job. His blog is good. Not very interactive, but with long essays about his time in the spanking business, and inside impressions of the models, with lots of good stories about what it’s like to produce spanking pictures and videos. All, of course, illustrated with the lovely photographs for which his company is justly famous. And designed by one of his on-staff designers, so it all looks smooth and professional.
By my own blogging standards, I have to link to him. You, my readers, will enjoy his blog, which is the only link criterion that’s truly important. But what I cannot bring myself to do, is to assist him in creating the brand confusion that he sought when he chose a name and domain so close to this blog’s. Thus, all future references and links on Spanking Blog will simply refer to “The Other One”. (That way, I won’t be contributing to the confusion between our spanking blogs that he seems to be hoping for.)
If you decide to link to The Other One, I hope you’ll join me in linking to it this way.