Easy Linkbait...

You can get burned if you do it too often, but if you call others out you can get easy links.

This is pure horseshit. One surefire indicator that something is rotten in this particular pulpit is that Mark's "oops, sorry" Bob's column contains no links. In fact, his columns never link to any external sources of information. Isn't it remarkable that someone who writes a weekly column for the Internet never links to anyone else?

Notice the post also has an update with another link in it. You sometimes can even leverage another person's story about someone else being full of it for a strong link of your own. Of course sometimes you can get even more by being a contrarian to the contrarian.

Also worth noting that outbound links are perhaps the single cheapest form of marketing available to someone new to the WWW who is trying to break into their field. All the blog tracking and link tracking tools make the self agrandizing must-track-myself even more pervasive. That makes it easier to break into a field by making sure the right eyes see it when you agree with industry leaders, and more importantly, when you do not.

People who say hello through a topical post or a link are far more likely to get a receptive reply than lamers asking for links to spammy ad cluttered sites at hello.