A couple of commenters in this post (one of whom needed some lessons in logic and elocution) objected to my supposed “snobbery.”

I have the same feelings as Warren. It does sounds a bit snobbish. I mean hell, just say no or ignore him. No need to humiliate the guy, even if it is anonymously. The guy knows he’s being made fun of.

I have run technically oriented websites since 1996. Hell, I even ran a BBS back in 1986. We would always swap links (or data numbers) with each other. I honestly can’t remember any time someone was lambasted like this, though I’m sure it happened back in the BBS days. A lot of kids ran those things, myself included.

Oh, for the BBS days.

My attitude has nothing to do with my self regard, or with my estimation of the value of the blog, or whether or not it’s part of the “A list ” (it’s not). It is completely independent of the number of readers that I have. It is entirely dependent on the value of my time, and page space. In a follow-up email, the guy said something to the effect, “Well, I ran into that sort of thing from Hugh Hewitt, but who the heck are you?”

Sorry, but I consider my time just as valuable as Hugh Hewitt (and Glenn Reynolds) considers his, and for the same reason–it is ultimately our only finite resource. I find a little bizarre the notion that, any time someone sends me an email requesting that I spend some of it to go check out their blog, with no information as to why it might be of interest to me or my readers, and link to it, I should drop what I’m doing and do so forthwith, and if I don’t, I’m a “snob.”

Folks, there are literally millions of blogs out there. I could spend the rest of my waning life reading them, and linking to them, and I would end up accomplishing nothing pertaining to my own goals, and my blogroll would be so large as to be completely useless to my readers. “Link exchanges” may have made sense back in the BBS days, but they make no sense whatsoever in the blogosphere.

This humble blog is a publication–my publication. I have to balance my time against maintaining and enhancing its quality, and in fact, the fact that I’m not a top blogger with high hittage, and generate little revenue from it, and must spend most of my time actually making a living, restricts even more the amount of time I have to spend blogging and reading other blogs.

I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to expect that if someone wants you to read their blog, or link to it, that they invest a little effort to provide a minimal amount of reason to do so, other than “I think you’ll like it.” If I were a book publisher who received a manuscript with no useful cover letter, would I be expected to read it before one that came well presented? If I were an employer being asked to interview and potentially hire someone without a resume, should I prefer them to the applicant with one, and a good one? And if I don’t do these things, am I a “snob”?

Of course, in this case, the problem is compounded by the fact that this was apparently a serial offender, according to other commenters, sending out minor variations of the same request to other people, both via email and comments. That, to me, is only one step removed from spamming (differing only in that it was somewhat targeted). The fact that I had to get around a spam filter to reply to his email was just the icing on the cake, and fraught with irony. I wish now that I’d had a filter to prevent him from emailing me. But maybe that would be “snobbery.”

So no, I have no regrets or apologies. It was his behavior that was rude, even if he didn’t/doesn’t understand that, not mine.

At least at this web site.

I just got the following email, subject : Hello from a republican blogger and Pajamas Media guy

Simberg,

I came across your site through the Pajamas Media site.

My blog is the [snipped to protect the guilty].

If you feel it is of a high quality, please consider a link or blogroll exchange.

Also, I get a decent amount (not Pajama-sized!) of traffic, in case you have anything
you would like to promote.

Respectfully,

[snipped to protect the guilty]

Let’s start with the subject line. I’m not a “republican blogger,” and anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time would know it. I’m guessing that if he came to the blog at all, it was only to get my email address. So it cuts no mustard with me to be informed that somone else is a “republican blogger.”

Next, no one addresses me as “Simberg” except spammers and trolls. Either use the honorific, or my first name.

Now there are general rules for how to get a link, none of which this guy followed. One of them is to read the blog for a while, so that you know what the interests are. A second is to send a permalink to some particular post that might be of interest to that blog’s readers, based on the prefatory reading. A no-no is to just say, “hey, here’s my blog.”

But here’s where the real joy comes. Just to do the guy a favor, I googled and replied with a copy of the rules for getting a link from Instapundit (though they’re generally applicable to other blogs, including this one) of which the two above are a subset.

And what do I get for my trouble? This:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

[snip link]

So, he sends me an email, but doesn’t bother to whitelist me to allow me to reply, instead expecting me to take the trouble to go to his site to do it myself, just so that I can provide him with useful information (while he’s provided me with nothing except a clueless request for a link). I’m all for blocking spam, but if you’re going to send someone an email and expect a response, I think it rude to make someone have to go through machinations in order to do so. Why isn’t this stupid anti-spam software set up to do that automatically? Anyone you send email to should be automatically white listed.

Anyway, rather than doing that, I decided to simply document it here, on the off chance that someone else will be educated, and perhaps avoid such things in the future.

[Monday morning update]

I have a follow-up post based on some comments.