Hello Hsien-Hsien Lei, Fellow Blogger

If you run a blog, you’ll have probably checked out your incoming links either in technorati, or if you’re using Wordpress, in the Dashboard. If you’re like me, you will have been puzzled by some of those so-called incoming links, because when you visited the page in question a link to your blog was nowhere to be seen, not in the sidebar, not in the post archives, nowhere. What you probably will see is a stack of ads and affiliate links. This is the latest form or spam - Dashboard Spam.

Dashboard spam is like the spam you get in the logs for your site, so-called referrer spam. It apparently links to your site with some perhaps meaningful phrase, but the backlink really does not exist.

However, musing on the existence of Dashboard Spam it occurred to me that you could use it, not as an instant message to a fellow blogger, but as a way of saying “Hello!” and sharing some link lurv. All you’d have to do is write a post, give it an appropriate title, and include a backlink to the blogger you wish to contact. (Hello Hsien-Hsien Lei Fellow Blogger)

If you’re contact regularly checks their backlinks, then they will hopefully spot your little message. Hsien-Hsien is a good friend of mine and a great science blogger who runs various sites (including the excellent EyeonDNA.com linked here), heads The DNA Network for genetics/DNA bloggers and carries some hilariously crazy discussions on her personal blog. So, “Hello Hsien!”

If anyone else fancies a hollerback from Sig Figs, let me know…