I think two questions to ask ourselves are “Why am I doing this?” and “What value does it add?”. I use that as a rule-of-thumb in deciding if I should or should not do something. In general life there is a whole lot more to consider than that, but for linking to another site, leaving a blog comment, retweeting etc, it works as a pretty good gauge.

It’s still true that without quality information on your site, people are not going to want to link to you. You have to provide something substantive and at least ‘appear’ to know a thing or two about what you write. Active participation in the online community, whether it be blogging, forum discussions etc, is what really makes the difference. As for ‘Ghosting’ – i.e. where someone blogs, writes, tweets on behalf of someone else – we are going to see a whole lot more of that in 2010.