Having two spam filters on your blog is enough to manage - sweeping out the leaks just makes it more of a pain in the ass. But one must remember that a lot of this problem is inherent in the communal nature of blogs themselves - the abiliity to comment and link to them. Google’s inbound link-based algorithms cannot be held solely to blame - this was never anticipated when they started their quest.

As Tom Hespos so accurately points out, when the rewards associated with blogging are pilfered by the rats (the spam blogs), those driving the process ( legitimate bloggers) will move onto other things.

What if the reward was stripped from the spam blogs?

Mr. Hespos notes that the community needs to rally around a concept, and I agree, but having the help of the search engines wouldn’t hurt either. Splogs come and go like the wind, and the search engines know when they arrive. New blogs could easily be indexed and “aged,” much the same way the ever-enigmatic Google “Sandbox” works. It doesn’t need to be Google doing all the work either - folks like Technorati, Weblogs, and Ping.blo.gs could easily band together for the right effect. What do you do with this coalition? Create a greylist, and develop a plugin for popular blog platforms that can use it - blogs don’t get a comment or trackback link until after they come out of that “sandbox.” Sites that decide to link to these splogs via paid exchanges get tossed on the greylist as well.

Splogs would continue to incur hosting and related charges, and couldn’t link anywhere. Meanwhile, indexes of new content could be cross-referenced against legitimate content, and ranked according to its originality (much as Mr. Hespos suggests). Those that continually pilfer other blogs continually sit on the greylist. No links, no traffic, no revenue. No incentive to do anything except produce decent content.

Splogs are about instant gratification - the reward. Eliminate that reward, and their purveyors are left with one choice - move on.

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion notes that a recent study pegged 75% of blog pings as spam. I think the number is more like 99%, but who’s asking me anyway.

Guys like Mark Cuban can lead the charge, but they are not going to solve the spam blog problem alone. It is the responsibility of bloggers (and service provision admins) to take care of their own systems if the community is going to make headway on this issue.

Over here at Spamroll, there is no blog spam, because the system employs a spam filter that the administrator actually knows how to use. Of course, Spamroll doesn’t get much in the way of legitimate comments or trackbacks either, but that is because it just sucks (but who’s asking me anyway).

While hundreds, or thousands or millions of new blogs are being created each day (I have heard all those numbers spewed), I never thought the crap would reach such a crecendo.

Google’s Blogger offering has been under extreme heat as of late. No sooner did Blogger released its MS Word to blog tool, then people cryed out that now it would be even easier to create spam blogs. And if a recent report is correct in saying that 60% of all Blogspot sites are spam blogs already, then maybe they have a point.

And the battle keeps raging.

Mark Cuban, the multi-billion dollar media and entertainment wonder, made the point of saying that the more spam blogs were produced, the more the rest of us lost out. He has a point. If people go looking for info from a blog and all they find is garbage, then maybe they will quit looking. Hopefully some will find what they need in an offering, however, and become a regular reader. I also think it was the “find” part that Cuban was most interested in, as IceRocket (a blog search engine Cuban is an investor in), quickly threatened to ban all Blogger blogs from its index. While IceRocket is a non-issue right now (as a small search engine), it has some backing and some focus, and could be a force to be reckoned with down the road. Meanwhile, Google heard the rumblings, and added a weak countermeasure. The jury is still out on it.

Now, Blogger has been beat up enough for the past week, so now lets point fingers at MSN’s blog offering.

The bottom line here is, as long as people can set up and post for free, this is all going to be nothing but a big headache for the service providers. And since the Googles, MSNs and Yahoos of the world are the ones most likely to feel the additional pain in terms of bad search results, it behooves them to do something about it, and quick.