I think it kind of boils down to this. Blogging is social communication on automation steroids. People mistrust the automation steroids part. When they see you exploring the boundaries of what technology steroids can do, well they sort of wonder about your motives. Or they discount what you are doing as manipulation.

Well no, but I do tend to be rather detached from potential consequences when looking at and explaining the mechanics of social interaction. It's interesting to me that you can set up a mechanism for social interaction, use it, and then discover that voila, you have search visibility.

It doesn't take a lot of expertise either. You do not have to purchase an expensive, search optimized blogging platform. All you have to do is get a blog, ping services like technorati and pubsub when you update, and link. Spammers essentially do away with the blog part and just pump out meaningless content.

In other words, spammers automate the social without the social. That's not what we did here, but we did focus on the automation part.