Londoncooking.co.uk

Look what slithered into my inbox last week:

‘I hope you are well.  I have really enjoyed looking through your blog.  (personalise what you like) I hope it is ok for me to quickly introduce myself and ask for your help in spreading the word about a cooking competition I have set up?’

Note to PR workhounds: always read your work thoroughly before hitting the ’spam’ button. It continues:

‘I work for a PR company called [name removed to protect the incompetent] and we are currently working with [generic food show/exhibition name here.]‘

‘The idea of the competition is to encourage people to submit their favourite British or Irish recipes in the medium of a video recipe!’ [!loving the exclamation!] ‘Entrants simply need to upload a video to lookandtaste.com with the tag bobi09com and it will automatically be entered into the competition.’

‘It would be fantastic if I could send you additional information about this event [no] and competition [nox2] and equally as great if you got involved and decided to enter a recipe.’ [guess what? That would be no! (notice the exclamation, thought you'd like that)]

‘We are offering a select number of bloggers [I'm 'select' - hoorah! And there was me thinking you were just spamming the entire blogpopulation!] the chance to offer their readers a comprehensive 30% discount on double ticket. Meaning they can book a double ticket (two adults) for just £10.50 – full price of £15…’

Wowee! If I put together a video (no small task, of course, if you want to do it well) you’ll ‘gift’ me a princely sum of £5 – bargain!

Like the food ad networks that want to pay bloggers 1p per thousand views of their site (no joke), this is what’s known in the business as digital usury.