I would love to feature your interesting site on my own site www.freewebs.com/cleopatrasboudoir

If you give me a link, I might be able to post it on my homepage or in My Favorite Links area.

My website deals with vintage and antique perfume bottles. I just started to write a weekly blog on there on perfume information, company profiles and listing their vintage perfumes, bottle types, etc. I also have a perfume bottle gallery, discussion board, perfume bottle reference books for sale, and above all, I offer a vintage perfume bottle identification and appraisal service.

Please let me know if we can exchange links.
Thank you in advance,
Grace Arnone

Hey kuri, that’s okay. It’s one of those things that is a bit more interesting for bloggers to talk about than it is for readers to read. But glad it’s getting blogged by whole bunches of folks.

Patty, the whispery implications disturb me, too, but mostly because it’s harder to deal with if we can’t “hear” what the concerns are. If people talk, they’ll talk, nothing to be done for it. Gossip is a function of human nature. But the fact that no one directly asked any of the various perfume bloggers publically upsets me, since it makes it seem as if the issue was being regarded as a dirty secret, rather than simply a fact of how the PR industry works. That’s not good, I don’t want any blog’s readers thinking they have to guess at motives rather than be able to talk about them explicitly and clearly. I have no clue if there was any sort of “whisper campaign” but I am sure many readers had their silent suspicions about many different sorts of bloggers, not just the perfume bloggers, when it comes to commercial asperations. Look at the whole Windows Vista laptop debacle, or the Dutch tourism brouhaha. Again, it’s better that it’s an issue openly addressed now by a lot of us, because the discussion itself is an invitation to readers to seek out transparency.

I think the thing that is bugging me most in this whole kerfuffle is definitely not your original comment, which was based on your personal experience and brought up a question and an issue, and it was out in the open for anyone to see. What irritated me to no end is how your comment was then taken and whispered about, apparently for a while now, and there was this whole underground backlash happening, perhaps throwing tar at some bloggers — whether rightly or wrongly, I have no idea since I don’t participate in that crap, no time.

It’s that whisper campaign that really makes me itch with fury. If people have issues, they should bring them up to the people they feel like accusing, not try and impugn their integrity in some backroom way, without ever making an accusation openly to the person involved. Just to make it clear, I don’t think you did that — you just made a comment and went about your life. I think others took your comment and started cococting some big conspiracy theory of blogger payola.

When the vintage refill thing surfaced, I did blog about it, posted links, and I also got a couple of psuedo-threatening (in a legal sort of way) from the person that I believe was the perpetrator, though they tried to pretend they were someone else in their e-mail.

If ever someone had an issue with me, our blog, or wanted to make an accusation, I would surely hope they would find their big, round ones and pony over to their e-mail editor and fire off that accusation so I/we could address it. It is that surreptitious innuendo that is the most damaging thing to a community.

Okay, having said all that, I absolutely do think the perfume blogging community should be transparent and keep their dealings with PR agencies out there as public information and be ready to respond if anyone asks, and they should note. I only get e-mails from one, and I normally ignore them, though I asked for samples once and got full bottles, which I promptly gave away and didn’t review. I know other bloggers have gotten bottles of things that they gave away that I never got. Do people assume that all bloggers get the same thing from the same companies? I don’t think they should.

Listne, if ever Serge and Freddie start sending me samples of their latest to review before everyone else, I’ll be the first person posting about it and bragging, but since I don’t think that’s ever, ever going to happen, it should be a long wait.

Okay, I’ll hush now. I hate whispering and gossip, which is the piece of this whole thing that chaps me, but the underlying issue I think is a great one to make sure we all address and think about.

Anyway, it’s been fascinating to read everyone’s opinions on this, so I’m glad the topic came up.

Victoria O. - I think we all struggle. It’s a fine line to tread sometimes, and made no less confusing by the fact that one of the valid outlets for receiving information are the PR firms themselves, not just directly from the house. “I think if you read someone’s blog consistently you get to know the blogger. You either trust them or you don’t.” I think you’re dead on there: if you can get a feel for how a blogger overall manages their affairs, you tend to know better where they’re coming from, and find their own objective subjectivity much more reliable as a consequence.

Victoria F. - I too am glad that we’ve got this out as a discussion topic. It’s perhaps an overdue one to talk about, for that matter. I truly feel like by the very act of bringing the issue to the forefront in the way many of us have, it discourages poor practices from becoming widespread. If it’s a known issue that fashion and beauty bloggers deal with these things, perhaps it gives readers a better critical eye for looking at all blogs.

Quite so, indeed.

http://cognoscented.blogspot.com/2007/05/after-reading-what-scentzilla-had-to.html

“This issue is not one that can be resolved by any one blogger categorically stating that PR, advertising, and its attendant weight of influence does not unduly cloud their judgment. What we need is a collective transparency as a blogging community if we wish to continue to be taken seriously.”

I cannot agree more with you on so many points you made. Blogs are not necessarily autonomous entities.

Great post, Katie! Thank you.

A paid glowing review, might make me search out and sniff something, but I certainly would not buy anything I didn’t like. So if Blogger A gets paid for promoting Product X and Blogger B does not, yet both give glowing reviews, what is the difference if when you go to try the fragrance you hate it?

I understand that it is ethics dilemma in question here but the bottom line is the consumer needs to be savvy. People will be and are unscrupulous. Such is the current state of the world unfortunately.