Because you can't get enough links

This place has been littered lately by nondescript TrackBacks from Thorny Path and Blog Bookmarker, which bill themselves as "social bookmarking" services: think Facebook plus StumbleUpon.

Blog Bookmarker seems to exist only to draw people into something called Hey! Nielsen, as in "Nielsen ratings," an extension of the company's research into Web 2.0, or at least 1.5. I've picked up a smidgen of traffic here and there from them, but only a smidgen; then again, most of the stuff I write is of scant interest to the sort of people Nielsen would like to research, and come to think of it, it's not impossible that this sentence could have ended quite a bit earlier. Thorny Path at least will let you look at some of the tagged items.

I had high hopes for sk*rt, a sort of Digg for dames, if you will, which hasn't taken off quite the way I'd expected despite its palpable No Boys Allowed vibe, a major selling point in some circles. Still, I've been known to hunt down stories through sk*rt, knowing that (1) I have a fair number of female readers and (2) there's a lot of stuff down that way to which I'm otherwise quite oblivious. If only one of these services should survive, this is the one I consider the keeper. Besides, they don't clutter up my database with TrackBacks.