Boing Boing founder and co-editor Mark Frauenfelder likened comment spam to environmental polution, saying:

“You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out.”

Can’t target Boing Boing for any funnies here, as the blog beats Spamroll’s traffic by what…10 trillion X? But I can say that the extent of my wasted brainpower was installing the latest version of MovableType with its newest spam filtering capabilities. Since then, virtually nothing (at least that is causing me any headaches that is).

but how about the spam? I haven’t seen much in the way blog spam coming from Blogspot as of late. Chris Pirillo was screaming bloody murder about it a few months back, as were other high-profile types.

What happened to Google’s splogs? Did someone put the breaks on it, or is everyone still having a problem with it (and it just so happened to be the sensationalist news of the day)?

Here is part of the answer.

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.

Splogs are being called a great new tool for spammers, but a least RSS feeds don’t include trojan file attachments that spy on you, trash your system, or empty your bank account.

At least not yet.