It’s Curt’s blog. If he doesn’t like it when people offer such quid pro quo links he has every right to say it.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t like them, nor do I accept them, either. I link to other blogs when I think there’s a post that merits being linked and discussed.

I believe the whole assumption behind PageRank is that’s why people link and therefore any other motivation to link would strike as some shade (black, white, gray) of gaming the system.

Anyhow, if you’re looking for more random negative opinions about me, you can go back (in effect) to the dbdebunk.com well and search on a string like “fabian pascal curt monash”. You can probably find some others by searching on “curt monash mysql” and “curt monash filemaker.” Even better, I get criticized for diametrically opposite things in those various sources (liking RDBMS too well or not liking them well enough, as the case may be).

http://www.dbdebunk.com/page/page/2468753.htm

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.databases.theory/2006-05/msg00368.html

Curt I suspect its your latest ploy is to get noticed or maybe get some consulting work with Infobionics, eh?

You’re giving one reason after another why an enterprise software company shouldn’t hire a clueless SEO. I agree that a search engine could probably be deceived into thinking Infobionics is relevant to this site. But I’m not a search engine — I’m the site’s owner and sole author.

If we accept the definition you link us to

“Bottom line re communicating with customers and prospects: If they think it’s spam, they’re automatically right, so you automatically did something wrong.”

…is ultimately a tautological definition since one cannot call something “defined” if its meaning varies from person to person.

Logical fallacies aside, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, including erroneously believing that Infobionics cellular databases are not related to the Text Technologies blog, which covers data mining and competitive research (both applications of cellular database technology).

This is my last post on the thread, so I’ll close out by saying that its really a matter of politeness. You smeared a perfectly respectable startup using words like “sleazy” and “low rent”, justifying it with a highly subjective definition of a particular word. If this is the kind of image you want to portray, then I would agree that nobody should in fact be contacting you – just you.

My definition of “spam” is somewhat stricter than that favored by people who actually engage in it. See, for example, http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/34667

Second, it’s extremely unlikely that the email was sent to me based on a careful manual analysis, since:

A. Infobionics doesn’t seem to do much in the areas this blog covers.

B. I write another blog for which it would be a better fit.

Third, as I’ve said, the email sent was obviously inappropriate for any site I run, and in particular this one, again leading me to doubt much thought went into the solicitation. The only people who would confuse me with a cheap opinion-whore are, I hope, those who — like yourself — view the whole Web through recommendation-prostitution lenses.