Sunday, November 27, 2011

Proposal For All Perfume Freaks: Fume Scout. Or something like that.

Perfume can be hard to find. Not nearly as hard as pan-fried chicken, but hard all the same. It's especially hard when you're just traveling, and you didn't do your Googling ahead of time to find out that you should go to the right-hand back corner of that little salon between the pizza place and the paint store, to the one shelf where they keep the Carons, below the shampoo and above the nail polish.

The perfume freaks who live in that town know all about that shelf, and they're certainly not interested in hiding it--the more Caron that gets sold, the higher the odds that they'll add one more shelf and start selling some Guerlains. But they don't necessarily have an accepted way to share the knowledge. OK, yes, there are the appropriate threads in Basenotes, but, really, can information like this be disseminated in too many places? Of course not. I'd sky-write it if that were an option.

So I propose that we disseminate it, all of us perfume bloggers. Under some common phrase, string, meme, whatever, so that when you've bought your plane ticket, you can Google that phrase and find out where to get the perfume. I already have a post about buying perfume in Ashland, Oregon, one that's sadly out of date. I was sitting down to start updating it, when it occurred to me that we could all do this, and then came this post.

So, what do you think? Want to join in and write your own post or page about where to find perfume in your own area, or for that matter, any area where you have knowledge? We could all crosslink madly. And what's the phrase? Ideally, it would be something that doesn't produce a lot of Google clutter when searched. I just Googled the string:

"fume scout" perfume

and got precisely one hit. But I'm sure that there are dozens of other possibilities.

Of course, the "fume" part reminds me of the way that I suggested #fumechat and then vanished into the ether, but on the other hand it looks like #fumechat is rolling along (with the active help of people who, unlike me, are not slackers), so, hey! Maybe this could, too.

Opinions?

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

6 comments:

  1. I'm all for it! :)
    I have the post(s) already written so I can just add the tag.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think it would be really helpful! I also have a post written for San Francisco, so like Ines I would only need to add the tag. And I know there are posts for London and several for Paris.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In general, I like the idea but I'm not sure if it can be implemented. Basenotes and NST have traffic that is times bigger than all of our blogs together so if people do not know to go there to check city guides how do we expect them to know/remember some obscure search term? And if it becomes popular in any way it will be immediately picked up and used by spam-agregators trying to sell something.

    How about compiling all those links/guides about we all know (I have the same ones as anotherperfumeblog mentioned above) and making pages on our blogs with those lists? The more blogs will refer to them the higher the score in Google they'll have.

    ~ Undina ~

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yo, Ines! Yay! What's the link, if that's OK, so I can put it in my list?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hey, APG! Yay! Would you mind sending me those links, too, for my list?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Howdy, undinaba! Definitely compiling all the links is part of the idea - if we're all pointing to each other, then somebody just has to make one hit to find the crumb trail for all of the information.

    On the string, I'm assuming that we'd also use all the other logical strings - perfume shopping guide, perfume shopping in cityname, and so on. But if we had a single string that means "local knowledge of brick and mortar perfume shopping", we might be able to at least find each other's posts, and that might make it easier to keep link lists up to date. And if we do all that cross-linking, then we might beat out the spammers in the Google results.

    ReplyDelete