Doing a "blog drive-by" is my new passion. After visiting some of the links from Nirmal's article, Blogging Mistakes-Complete List, I realize that this is considered a mistake by some bloggers. I disagree with their assessment in this instance. They point out bloggers who do a quick mention of another website and link to it and nothing more. This is not what I do. I not only link to a blog that I've visited, but I actually read the articles on their blog and even comment on some of them. It's a different ball game altogether.

An example of a blog where I read multiple articles is at www.mapelli.info. What led me to the blog? A link from Nirmal's article, The Blogging Mistake I Did For 25 Years. I didn't comment on Francesco's blog because the comment would have been "Ummm, the Internet didn't exist 25 years ago" or something like that, which was already well-covered in other comments.

When I first started doing my "drive-bys", I did it for one selfish reason: To get pings to other blogs which would obviously point back to mine. I kept doing it for reasons that are completely unselfish: To promote other bloggers and to point my readers to interesting blogs, articles and videos. Judging by the outbound clicks I'm seeing with Clicky, it seems to be working well. I try to do the drive-bys daily but some circumstances (such as DSL and power outages) have been throwing monkey wrenches into my well-oiled machine.

To put it all into one neat package, or perspective if you prefer, I have found that promoting a small fraction of the more than 70 million blogs on the Internet gives me more satisfaction than all the visits I will ever receive on my own blog. The fact that some of my newest regular readers are reading my blog specifically because of my drive-bys is a fantastic side effect that I didn't expect.

I want to thank jer at nyquil.ORG for unwittingly inspiring me.