One of the funniest secrets I learned about radio stations was that all-American deejays and salesmen would often try to hold an English or Australian accent for 30 seconds in their commercials.  Why? Only because accents stood out.

When my friend Matt, who's into every sort of legal pseudo-pyramid promotion scheme on the Internet, sent me a Vinefire link, I thought "aw jeez, here we go again."  But the self-updating banner that proudly proclaimed Matt had made $50 since September 1 raised an eyebrow. 

To humor him, I decided to check out the link.

I got the absolute fakest-sounding British accent ever, with a mildly intriguing elevator pitch: LinkVine adds money to your LV account, up to $25 daily, through amounts that boggle the mind: $0.23 for every link you follow, $0.08 each time you vote a link up and down, and $0.02 for every free link you submit that's voted up.  Compared to certain contextualized advertising programs where months could go by without a penny, it's an oasis in the desert.  But is it a mirage?

By now I would have been walking away from this program as an obvious unsupportable Ponzi scheme.  Yet the site is cleanly made, the submitted links from all walks of e-commerce work, the idea of voting down a spammy link sounds cool, and submitting free live links that get updated every minute just about matches Craigslist's and Twitter's ability to get advertising content out fast.

And the second part is an audacious premise: the company that's buying LinkVine out is paying all the bills! Again, this would be inherently ridiculous, but LV has given itself room in its disclaimer to admit that, depending on its performance, money already put into LV accounts may go up or down in value before it can be cashed.  Could be zero, could be a decent amount should this buyout actually happen.  But for once the cold hard possibility is being addressed now instead of being dodged until the site collapses from lack of trust.

I'll be astonished one last time with VineFire should a deal actually go through, regardless of whether they pay existing users or not.  But I wish the company the best, even if it has to modify its payouts -- and paidouts -- to be successful.  There's a lot of hard work that's gone into it, they haven't spammed me once today, and I've gotten a little free traffic from the links I've submitted.