Jim Westergren, the man behind SEO Fusion and some great articles about link building, has launched a new service: Smart Link Building. What he does is the following: you give him a site that you want links for and a list of keywords. Then he writes 20 mini-articles, with 10 links in each article, and places these on domains he owns, and links them, so that each article get's at least a PR of 2.
I think this is a great idea, and for the $1500 it costs, it sure is worth trying it on a few of your sites, especially because it's a one time fee, and it get's you a nice amoutn of permanent links.
How is this anything but spamming of search engines? You're paying someone to create bogus content with the intent to trick search engines into increasing your ranking. There's a very fine line, but I think this is distinctly on the bad side of that line.
Well, buying links in general is considered bad by most of the SEs, this is just another way of doing SEO. You might consider it blackhat, if it works, people will use it anyway.
The thing is that it looks good and sounds good but you'd be surprised at how easy this footprint is to detect algorithmically.
That is my main concern too :)