BM is a not exactly a SCAM, but...

A more savvy blogger than I has discovered that blogging! magazine is most likely a scam.

I'll change my position if the promised "free trial issue" is ever accessible.

After accessing the old site via the wayback machine, it does look like every other month, it ran the same "free trial issue," "sign up now" crap to get money.

Caveat emptor.

(Read this, this, this, and this, too.)

UPDATE: Ok, well, I FINALLY got a welcome message at Mon, 14 Mar 2005 20:40:55 (which is sometime on Monday afternoon here where I live) to look at the free issue. The email also said that if I wanted to unsubscribe and get a refund, I could do so, provided through the links on the members area. I followed the link through the email and was able to get into the members area, so that was a plus. I clicked on several of the "download issue" links that were located on the page, and only one of them actually went to the issue. However, the issue did not load. Acrobat Reader gave me an error message.

I decided that I was going to unsubscribe as soon as I saw that was an option. So in the members area, I clicked on the unsub link, but it gave a "page not found" error. I finally was able to access the unsub link by taking out part of the address.

I don't know if they actually got things going on their site, or they saw my trackback on their blog, so that was why they sent me an email.

I won't denigrate the publication out of hand. Who knows? Future issues might be a whole lot better than this premiere issue. However, like I said above: CAVEAT EMPTOR.