Spam

Jon Udell writes that blog spam will go away one day:

while we were debating the options, [e-mail] spam went away. Well, OK, it didn’t go away, but I stopped seeing the vast majority of it, thanks to the cumulative effect of filters applied to servers

The blog spam we are seeing is a result of SEO trying to game Google and the other search engines. Once nofollow is in place everywhere, or Google figures out how to track blog spam, the problem goes away.

Most blog spam I see nowadays are still not automated, as various forms of captcha has been introduced to raise the bar somewhat. However, there still isn’t enough disincentive not to spam. A hosted comment service stands the best chance of fighting this scourge.