Almost Famous

For a moment, I thought I'd been discovered by a really cool blog, "Everything Burns," when it showed up in my Daypop. But it turns out that the link to my blog was only temporary and that I had been caught up in a clever link sweep that preys on what blog author Jim Flanagan calls "narcissurfers." (Great term, Jim!)

Narcissurfer that I am, naturally I checked out Jim's site as soon as I saw it in my Daypop. Is this a cool way to get traffic, or is it too sneaky? Actually, Jim is very up front about it and 'fesses up on one of his site's pages, in which he explains:

"The bottom part of the left-hand sidebar is generated from the changes.xml file at Weblogs.com. Every 10 minutes, a daemon grabs that file, and takes the most-recent 50 updated weblogs (which aren't filtered out), and makes links to them. If your page was in that top 50 when blogdex came along to scrape Everything Burns, you'll show up there. But by the time you get here, that link has scrolled off the bottom."

So I'll just say, hats off, Jim for being smarter than I am. But I do have one question for you. Now that I've given you a mention and a thumbs up, do I get a permanent link?