The Score Bard, who writes awfully clever baseball poetry and has a couple of awfully fun baseball distractions on his site (Fantasy Draft Simulator is a nice time-waster) posted a poem recently wishing he had more readers. And, lo and behold, it's getting him an awful lot of links. Like this one. In some ways, asking for it seems like cheating, I don't know why. I feel like good content ought to bring the links and the readers, not an express request. Not that he doesn't have good content, because, word for word, it's probably among the most creative and well-written sites out there, but, like he writes somewhere on the site recently, he doesn't update every day, because poetry's not like that. But that makes it easy to forget about a site, and stop going back. Like I hadn't been there since April or May, until I saw a link somewhere this morning -- and it doesn't take all that long to catch up. So the new links'll get him visitors, but if there's two weeks between content, they probably won't come back. I don't know where I'm going with this post. Personally, in a way I see it as a challenge to write content good enough that people want to link to, so when my visitor numbers take a jump on a particular day, I feel like I've actually created worthy content that people are either telling other people about or linking to from somewhere. And maybe that's not how it works, but I don't know. I understand the Score Bard's frustration -- I'd love more people to be reading my words, anyone would... but I feel like the way to get there is content people are motivated to come back to, not threatening to stop writing if more people don't link to me or tell their friends to come read my site. Internet blackmail. :) Which isn't exactly what he did, but it's kind of what he did. Nevertheless, I give him a pass since his site is so creative and unique and he's clearly talented. But if CNN.com starts complaining on its home page that it wishes it had more readers, you won't see a link from me....