I'm starting to get tired of blog comment and trackback spam. Really tired. Nothing seems to work, and even MT Blacklist, while making spam somewhat easier to delete, only provides an illusory feeling of a solution, because it only adds old spam to a master list, whereas new spam "sites" are cranked out ad infinitum. The spammers now are using Blogger.com to start up phony blogs which only complicate my deleting them (because if I am not careful I'll end up blocking all blogspot blogs), and worst of all the legitimate comments and trackbacks are lost in a sea of spam, and end up getting deleted with them.

It seems as if the longer this blog exists, the worse it gets. And I know it sounds paranoid, but it also seems that my very act of deleting the spam serves to fuel the creation of more. It is monstrous, growing, and interfering with blogging.

No one has any solutions, and some purported "solutions" are part of the problem. The worst thing you can do is complain to a spammer's trash spam ISP in some damned country so trashy that its government probably thinks trash spam is good for the economy. Hell I'll bet there are spam countries by now. I'm so sure there are that I don't even want to know. I hate getting mad at entire countries because of the electronic activities of a few crooks.

I've called for crucifixion of spammers, but that's just another utopian dream. It's tempting to consider a nuclear option against the host countries, but that's overkill, as there are relatively few actual spammers who do this.

Could we perhaps hit the electronic backbones of spam ISP countries with non-lethal electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) radiation?

Quoting the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (1-23-98), the news agency AFP said the high-power microwave bombs ("bear cans") could be bought on the Russian market for "several hundreds of thousands kronor" (< $150,000) and had already been bought by the Australian military among others.

It said the bomb was stored in a briefcase and emitted short, high-energy pulses reaching 10 gigawatts, which could destroy complex electronics systems. As tested, the bomb presents a threat to the Swedish military, in particular to the JAS 39 Gripen jet fighter that it is trying to export. It can also knock out electronic systems of nuclear or electric power plants, banks, trains, or even a simple telephone switchboard.

I'd hate to think that such a wonderful deed might be considered terrorism, but we live in a complex world.

Plans for improvised EMP devices can be downloaded here . . .

Seriously, I don't advocate doing anything illegal. But if there are certifiable spam countries, might there be a way to simply shut off their Internet access? No. Because, even if there were, the United States tops the list of spam-generating countries.

I guess my search to blame countries is all in vain. Even blaming the ISPs isn't completely fair, because anyone can do anything, and even blogger.com hasn't been able to stop spam blogs from being created, automatically, by robots.

According to Web log index Technorati (technorati.com), 39,000 fake blogs were created in the past week by automated "spam blog" creation tools and designed to promote the Google page rank of other pages. A large portion of those sites were reportedly created through Blogger.

The spam blogs typically include nonsensical or stolen content with a high number of links to the site the creator wants to promote among search algorithms. Google's algorithm is known to consider external links as a key indicator of a site's popularity.

Some of the posts are keyword-optimized. Reports say that many of Google's blogs feature posts that are littered with the names of prominent bloggers, another tactic designed to increase popularity in search rankings.

The volume of spam blogs has raised the ire of critics and blog search engine IceRocket (icerocket.com) went so far as to stop indexing posts from Blogger. One of its investors, outspoken NBA owner Mark Cuban, wrote this week in his own personal blog (blogmaverick.com) that the measure is temporary but warned Google should ameliorate the situation or face a permanent ban.

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.

(Fortunately, no one has thought of using political spam blogs to compete for ecosystem rankings. Oh, no, they'd never do such a thing! That's because some things shouldn't be politicized. . . Spam can consist only of commercial things, of course.)

MORE: I emailed blogger.com about a blogspot site which spammed me last night, but the damned site is still up. While it might feel good to do things like "spam the spammer" by mass emailing to the blog's ISP, that would only hurt other blogs. The system is vulnerable, because there's no easy way to distinguish real words from fake words. Might as well try to distinguish sincerity from insincerity.

AND MORE: I was being facetious about political spam. It's protected of course. Which means that regardless of its insincerity, it's not "real" spam. The philosophical implications (i.e. why gratuitously advertising things is more egregious than gratuitously advertising ideas or politicians) will have to wait.