Well, if you actually contribute to the content of their sites most webmasters would not mind if you added a link to your site with a "discuss it here" for a message board for instance added to it. That is just my experience.
A white hat hires 500 third world people to comment on blogs, forums, lenses, and digg his or her posts. A blackhat uses a script to comment on blogs, forums, lenses, and digg his or her posts. What's the difference really? The noise level of the Internet increases a tiny bit, and Google uses a few more cycles to separate "the wheat from the chaff". It's all the same.
not blackhat .. but do it slowly as if its natural link building . if the bot sees that your site has got 100's of backlinks in an hour , it is definitely going to punish your blog/site .
Wow some contradictory thoughts here. I'll be by no means scraping content, those sites annoy me to hell, especially when some outrank the good stuff. It seems like a weird situation, many of you basing your thoughts on the intention. But as far as I know google cant read minds. And also what's stopping small free hosted sites linking to me anyway? Loads already do. How can google see the difference? SEO sucks.
They can't really. SEO is all about weighing up risk against reward, if you can't be detected then go for it. I only say it's black hat because really Google never wanted people to scew their listings through any kind of link building. But just because it's blackhat doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, blackhat has a bad name associated to it, but really imo, everyone is doing it. No one gives a flying **** about Google's listings anyway. Or if they did, they wouldn't be an SEO'ist.
It really depends upon your perception. For google it could be blackhat since the links are not natural. You are building those sites for the sole purpose of linkbuilding. But if you ask a blackhatter, then he might laugh if you call this a black hat technique.