I strongly disagree with your statement. I post a lot on this forum and I don't do it just to promote my blog. Meaning, I wouldn't just post a message with no value, simply to expose a link to my site. I think your arguement *might* have some basis if people were posting messages like "Yup." or "I agree." which provide no value at all, and are just used to expose a link to their site, but that can be easily reported and disallowed by the moderators.
Outside of that, leave the links to our sites alone. I spent a lot of time setting up my blog and writing the articles on there and I'm proud of it. I'm not going to shy away from providing a link to it to anyone who's interested in seeing who I am. If you don't want to click on it, then don't, nobody is forcing you.
The arguement you have is baseless in the blogosphere community because one of the reasons blogging became so popular in the first place was BECAUSE people allowed cross-linking to happen. It is the whole concept of GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE. In fact, one of the very FIRST things I did when I setup my own blog was to give Steve Pavlina a link right off of my home page because of the value I've gotten from his blog. And YES I am aware of the SEO implications of outbound links. Blogging isn't about SEO efficiency, it's about helping people. Steve allows URL links because he knows they help people and his interest is to help people, because he knows that by helping people he helps himself. ie. If my website becomes more successful and gets more traffic, the link to his website on my home page gets more exposure and more people click on his site too and that's of value to him.
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