Good article. It´s funny; I came up with the same analogy independently without reading anything about it. Great minds think alike.

It sure seems like there should be a better way of improving your site´s rank -- building backlinks almost requires you to be spammy, and I really don´t like that. I´m not smart enough to come up with an alternate, but you would think one of the very bright people at Google could come up with something better.

This seems to be very nice
i totally agree with you
great work done by you

So true, backlinking is queen. Without backlinks Google does not have much way to measure the authority of your website.