Inbound links are the indirect goal of every blogger. I found the article to be very informative about the details of a business segment I wasn't familiar with. What makes this article different than others?
People blog for many different reasons. I would argue that posts written to generate linkbacks and boost page rank are actually relatively unusual. I think most blog posts are either written to directly promote something on-site or to bring in direct revenue through ad impressions or because, ya know, the person just has a story to tell or an ego to stroke.
There are already plenty of well-written articles on the Web about traffic pumping; why did FeeFighters choose to write yet another article (probably heavily cribbed from others without attribution) instead of just linking to an existing one? For the juice.
Given that so many links on HN follow this pattern, however, I don't think this subthread is very useful.
