Spam blogs grow

Cross posted from my other blog: Oncee@Blogger

Chris Pirillo says Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!!

Tim Bray weighs in as well.

Dan Gillmor says Spam-blogs: Google's Mess Harms Everyone

Dave Winer says:

I may have a better perspective on this, having spent much of the last year watching the quality of weblogs.com go down as spam-blogs (mostly from Blogspot, as Chris notes below) filled the pipe with their nonsense, and of course we pass the junk right on down the food chain to Technorati and PubSub. Good news about that, I had lunch with Niall Kennedy at Technorati on Thursday, in SF, and we're going to do some work to help get better data to flow into Technorati. I know how to bootstrap cooperation, even if people don't necessarily like me, I know how to get them to help each other. I'll explain later. In any case, here's something to memorize. Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. They don't like to listen to me, maybe they'll accept Verisign's help.

So what does this mean for those our us who use Blogger to host our blogs? I'm not sure, but it's scary. My advice is to report spam blogs using the "Flag" button to report the blog to Google. Let's hope Google does something soon like using word verification for posts, or our little blogs will be lost in the spam.

Update: Jeff Jarvis says F the spam bloggers.