As I said, I can agree that you might be able to weed out splogs, but you aren’t going to stop the clueless Mommie blog from pestering me without an abuse system. It doesn’t have to be draconian,, but there has to be a way to warn people that they can’t just send out promiscous link requests to unrelated sites (unless to another site that doesn’t care about relevance).

pcunix
Linkshare is an affilate site so I’m not sure how you compare it to Weblog Empire. As for the forum and what to discuss…well that is a problem in one way because I’ve totally opened the PM system and encoruages people to list their emails as well. Its about facilitating deals between one blogger and another, and I don’t really care as to how they do it, hence I’ve given the options. Sure, it would look better for me if it was all played out in public but I’ve already got feedback from ppl who have done great link deals by PM and email. You know sometimes trusting ppl isn’t bad? sure, some ppl will abuse it, and I’m watching that (trust me on this), but as I’ve already posted, most of us get these deals by email anyway, this way you get to pick or advertise. The control changes from others to you. There is no evil intent, and can I say that I’m making virtuallly no money out of it either, I’ve done it because I believe that its an opportunity to help other bloggers.

A site like linkshare.com just has you list your site in a category and allows you to make link offers to others in the categories you are interested in. In theory, that’s what you want, and if it weren’t for all the spammers and the idiots who think football or doll collecting would be a lovely link for your C programming site, it might actually be. But of course the spammers and morons swamp such places, making them useless.

So lets say he keeps out the spammers. It’s quite a bit harder to keep out the morons because you don’t know who they are until they start pestering everyone else.

Also, the forum idea leaves me a little puzzled. What’s to discuss? I make a post (and following Aaron’s tongue in cheek style is tempting) and then what? Where’s the “forum”?

I’m a single blueish male blog. I enjoy trackbacks (Why do others call that stalking??), scintillating conversation and impressing people with my stats (mine is bigger than yours).

Let’s do lunch.

Unfortunately my blog is still very shy(low readership) and only just recently opened itself up to talking to the rest of the world(comments enabled). Maybe once people see what my blog is doing(rss) there might be some interest in “courting” my blog.

:-)

A.H