I was surprised and dismayed to get the following message this afternoon:

Your site The Intuitive Life (http://www.intuitive.com/blog/) has recently been linked to by voyeur webcam blog (link removed because, well, I don’t want to link to this garbage from my weblog) using the www.blogLinker.com system.

Your list will automatically link back to the initiating linker.

Please log in to blogLinker.com to manage your list of links. Remember, you can always hide any link in your list, or delete it completely.

Lovely, eh?

Fortunately, while I don’t even remember ever signing up at BlogLinker, I apparently had an account and could easily delete the offensive backlink. But it didn’t really matter because I am completely against including a blind code snippet from a third-party site. After all, gadzooks, what if BlogLinker hadn’t emailed me the update, or my spam filter had caught it and I hadn’t? Having a link to a porn site (that I didn’t even screen beforehand!) would be wildly inappropriate and annoying as heck.

In my eyes, this is yet another reason to retain tight control of every element of your weblog, from favorites to backlinks to trackbacks. After all, in the 21st Century, if you don’t manage your links, someone else will.