Why even bother asking for permission to link to a site?
OK...I'm a web guy in the TV/media biz, so I'm not exactly surrounded by a huge community of people who subscribe to the software developer’s way of life. In other words, I get a lot of requests from people from all walks of life who think “you’ve got a great Inter-web,” try to email 90MB TIFFs embedded in Word documents, and constantly ask me where on the Internet they can find information on any topic, as if I’ve got Google’s entire search index stored mentally. You get the picture.
Thus, my reason for writing - it's perfectly OK for the non-hardcore web community and those marketing morons not in the know to link to someone's site without asking. For real.
Throughout the year, but in particular around the holidays, I get bombarded by requests by legitimate individuals and organizations that send request e-mails asking if they can link to my site (I've gotten 7 today so far). Now, I did a fair amount of coursework in graduate school on intellectual property law (which is to say, 1 class), and while it may be kosher to ask to associate oneself to another organization's site, it's realistically impossible to accurately track just who out there is connecting to your domain via hypermedia.
I'm a marketing major myself, so this practice of unnecessary politeness drives me nuts. Such was a reasonable inquiry when the Web first took off, but we’re too far into the game at this point. Behavior of this nature is arguably THE reason the job title of “Administrative Assistant” was created...giving those people something to do for 8 hours a day, and giving them something to lay claim to.
If IBM started linking to my site, it's free press for my company's stuff - and there really is no such thing as bad press. We in the blogging community openly and great frequency and passion link to other people's blogs, to MSDN, to countless online resources, news articles, media files, and everything under the sun. And we do so both in praise of, in reference to, and in criticism towards, the content contained therein.
My boss at a former job once asked me to compile a list of ALL the sites pointing to our domain. How the heck am I to list not only the media & news sites linking to us, but also every Geocities and AngelFire site out there? Impossible! Heck, it's the foundation of why the Web was created in the first place, so make use of it.
A company I once dealt with had an agreement companies needed to sign if they were to link to any of its pages, containing so much legalese it would make Johnny Cochran salivate. Not surprisingly, no one bit with the agreement, and most people got turned away by the anal retentiveness. Those that were still interested just did anyway, I’m guessing out of spite. And again, the company itself never really who was doing so.
So fear not, e-marketers, link away. Let me put it in terms you can understand, wherein you can believe your own hype. Swallow a healthy spoonful of the medicine from the very Nike campaign you helped to create: just do it.