Question to the blog community...when is it OK to solicit links?

Today, I saw someone asking other people to link to specific info on their blogs. I deleted the mail but it may have involved some product features or something. To me, it seems a little unusual to *ask” someone to link to your blog, but I may have sent out one or 2 posts to Microsoft marketers pretty much saying “look at me! look at me!”. Not including a specific request to link to my blog...which was a total newbie back then.

My feeling is that if your content is interesting enough, people will link. But asking for the link is kind of forcing the matter. I guess I feel that blogging should be a little more of an organic process (I use the word “organic” too much, I know). Now you won't see me sending out requests to people to link to me or reference my posts somehow, so this is just a general question: Is it ever OK to directly solicit links? If so, when is it OK?

I find myself pretty darn interesting so I'm not too worried about the links ; )