I just received a anonymous spam comment in this journal with a link to a page on Blogger (a.k.a. Blogspot, owned by Google). LiveJournal generally does a good job at weeding out spam, but blogger's recent "improvements" appear as if they're aimed at aiding spamblogs. They've removed the "flag as objectionable" feature from the blog pages so that there is now clearcut and intuitive way to call out spam. I wonder if Blogger/Google simply see no motivation to fight the spamblogs. A large percentage of the Blogger spamblogs use Google Adsense and all of them pull traffic into Blogger, so Google actually makes money on them.

However, I suspect Google's effective spam-tolerance may capsize them in the end. The Google search engine, and especially their blogsearch, is rapidly sinking into a bog of junk and spam. The Search Wikia project, due to launch this year, could start seriously nibbling at Google's marketshare by providing a less spam-ridden alternative. That not only translates to less traffic at google.com, but less traffic for the multitude of adsense-using spamsites and spamblogs as well. If Google doesn't get serious about fighting spam soon, it could be their undoing.

Blogger (a.k.a. blogspot.com) is becoming more and more about spamblogs now. The proportion of actual blogs there has been decreasing steadily. I've got one copying this LiveJournal, and I've seen great many of my friends mention their blogs are copied too. Spamblogs started as blogs that would randomly take text segments from a number of journals, but now they simply copy whole blogs. Blogger is so completely unmotivated to discourage spamblogging it seems as if they actually like hosting them for the extra clicks they bring in.

I'm used to what I type being cached at various sites on the net, so the fact that there is an extra copy does not bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is that it muddies the search result, especially for people looking for content specifically related to me and what I write about. The spam blogs are not tagged and comments won't be responded to. They provide an inferior detour from the blog they copy at the expense of both the blogger and the reader.