Oh yeah, here's a really good idea-- not. Zimbo.com says they'll promote your blog but if you knew the real costs you might not be so quick to give away your intellectual property for what might be a few more readers.

Allow me to cue you in on some lessons that were rather hard learned and were some of the reasons I chose to become an indie publisher.

Back in the Web 1.0 days writers could sometimes make a lot of money posting content to the web. While new to the game I sometimes earned $300.oo for a few hours working from my home but when the Dot Com Bust came to pass the same companies that had once paid me well resorted to pay schemes that were little more than scams. One of these companies went so far as to become an agent for all the writers they had previously been paying. Only problem was they didn't bother to inquire of any of us as to whether or not we wanted or needed agents. They had thousands of works that we had yet to be paid for and simply started trying to sell them without ever consulting we authors as to what we thought would be a fair price for our works. And the prices they quoted for our work were insulting to all of us.

So along comes Web 2.0, Creative Commons and Internet sharecropping all over again.

In the case of Zimbo what they want to do is get you to give them the entire content of your blog in exchange for a few readers. Look, I value readers as much as anyone but if you want to build an online "publishing" empire then I expect real money for my efforts. Zimbo wants the right to add your content to their Wikizines where they can reap what they hope will be huge profits while you sit at home writing for free, As a mater of fact Zimbo already claims to have "Thousands of online magazines at your fingertips."

So what are you giving up besides your content? For starters: Google Page Rank. When search engine robots see the same content on more than one website they assume that content to be spam and lower the Page Rank of the sites that are sharing content. Your site's loss in Page Rank also means you lose readers.

And why is lost search engine PR not a problem for Zimbo.com?

Zimbo.com is owned by Schlund + Partner AG, a multi-billion dollar company and Europe's largest domain name registrar. This is one of the wealthiest companies in the world and they plan to remain that way by not paying you for your intellectual property, and thousands, if not millions of you are already letting them get away with making you their slaves.