Welcome to My World

Among the many feeds I have piled into Google Reader for my amusements is PFBlogs, the “Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggegator,” which culls various personal financing blogs and smashes them all together. In turn, they provide a single feed suitable for digestion by Google Reader.

The decreasingly useful content that trickles through this thing gave me a particularly strange site to skim through this evening. I was wondering, as I scrolled through the “All Items” pile of Google Reader this evening, why the hell is “Verse of the Day” an item on my list (complete with a fucking scripture quote)? I looked below that headline for the feed responsible, and was surprised to see it coming from PFBlogs. Loading the actual “article” led to a remarkably content-free quoting of the good ol’ bible — on the all-time fiction best seller’s list (though I was pleased to hear the Ikea catalog surpassed the bible in total copies published … that’s one of the few instances I’m happy to see consumerism beat out an ideology ).

This so-called “personal finance blog” is a thinly-veiled excuse to shovel religion down its readers’ throats — the only regular postings are the daily verse quote, loosely (and badly) tied to some vague, supposedly relevant “finance tip.” Of course, that “tip” is usually nothing more than “see? Even the bible talks about paying taxes!” There are occasional smatterings of personal finance “advice” that isn’t smeared with religious feces, but those posts are pretty rare compared to the daily quotes (and they’re perfect candidates for “cut-and-paste” blogging examples).

It makes me wonder, though, what’s the damned point? It’s a generic Wordpress hosted blog (it’s a subdomain of wordpress.com), it has obvious referral links and plenty of ads, and is otherwise worthless. It surely can’t be getting enough hits to warrant the effort, can it? Do they honestly hope to convert anybody, or is this just an effort to show some kind of “unique” content a few times a week so the search engines keep ranking the page?

Sigh. I suppose this is no different than any other crappy ad farm, is it?