Questionable expertise

Last week I received an email from Michael Weinberg, the "Founder and CEO" of a company called Wizpert.  Apparently, Wizpert bills itself as a sort of online help desk for everything.  They find bloggers to act as "experts" in various topics, and then people seeking advice on those topics can contact the bloggers for help.  The bloggers are paid (some nominal fee, I'm sure) and Wizpert of course takes its cut as well.  You can read more about it here if you're interested.

Why me, you ask?  I was curious as well.  I mean, I have certainly educated myself quite a bit about infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the past year or so, but have I really reached "expert" status so quickly?  Let's see...

Hi Aramis,

I was reading your blog http://infertilesmurf.blogspot.com and thought that your knowledge would be of great value to our users, who pay our experts a premium for advice.

Our platform, called Wizpert, is a fast growing community of experts, where users seek advice and coaching on an array of topics, such as caring for and training pets (dogs, birds, birds, etc.).

Wow.  They must need bird experts pretty badly.  I mean, they wrote it twice.  Plus, if the best bird expert they can find is a blogger who wrote one post about how much she hated her husband's adopted cockatiel, the market for bird experts must be pretty slim pickings.  That, or Wizpert is using a spectacularly shitty search program to troll through blogs to find their "experts".  I chalked it up to the latter, ignored the email and left it at that.

That was before my BFN.  This was today.  

Hi Aramis,

Just wanted to follow up on my note (below) — have you had a chance to take a look?

As explained, after reading your blog, I think you would be a great fit as a wizpert and would love to have you join our community.

To create a free account go to http://wizpert.com/register_expert?beta_key=pets

Please contact me personally with any questions.

All the best,
Michael

Don't mess with a bitch after a BFN, Michael. 

Dear Michael,

I'm pretty confident in saying that you haven't actually read my blog.  If you had, you would have seen right away that it is a blog about infertility, not pets.  If one post about my pet cockatiel makes me an expert in pets, then I feel sorry for anyone using Wizpert.  I would suggest improving your screening technique when searching for your "experts", and then actually reading their blogs before approaching them.  I'm not interested.

I got a bounceback reply thanking me for my interest in joining Wizpert.