Though it seemed as if Google was starting to make some headway into the spam blog problem on its Blogger service, the spammers seem to have turned the tide by cracking the CAPTCHA system and creating more accounts than ever before.

As scraping via email has gained greater attention, the problem has brought the problem of spam blogs to the doorstep of mailing list administrators and group moderators. Learn how to protect your list.

Robert Scoble kicked off a controversy when he was banned from Facebook for, according to him, running a script from a competing social network, Plaxo, designed to extract his Facebook account data and port it over to an account elsewhere.
The response was very divided. Many supported Scoble for what he did while others accused him [...]

A presentation by Jason Calacanis at LeWeb3 earlier this month drew attention the problem of Web “pollution” as a threat to the Internet itself.
According to Calacanis, Usenet is an case study on what is currently happening to the Web. In his speech, he stated that Usenet, ten to fifteen years ago, was a very [...]

Though it doesn’t make much sense, Google Image Search had not been indexing images on its Google’s own Blogspot service until earlier this month.
Though this is good news in that it will improve the effectiveness of image search techniques, such as the digital fingerprint method I described on the Blog Herald, it could also [...]

Content theft and RSS scraping is not going away. As more and more spammers get into the game and the tools they use improve in effectiveness, the problem is only going to get worse. Because of this, RSS feeds are going to remain vulnerable and bloggers will continue to seek out ways to protect them.
However, [...]

For the next chapter in the “DMCA Seven” series, we’re taking a look at one of the most common types of hosts out there, blog hosts.
Many of these hosts have been copyright headaches for Webmasters. They are prime targets for spam blogs and scrapers and some have played a huge role in rise of [...]

In a pair of previous posts I lauded Google’s progress in the war on Spam on its Blogspot service. Though my intuition was confirmed, at least somewhat, by Google itself, it appears I might have spoken too soon.
I recently ran across this link on the social news site Reddit. It is a submissions listing for [...]

Updated Information Here
As part of running this site, I subscribe to many different Technorati Watchlists. They help me keep up to date on the latest in content-theft and plagiarism-related issues.
Unfortunately, I see a great deal of spam blogs on these watchlists. What’s worse, it can be hard to tell, when looking at my RSS [...]

To update yesterday’s post about Wordpress.com being relatively free of spam blogs, I was contacted by Anil Dash, a Vice President at Six Apart, about their LiveJournal service.
According to Dash, the LiveJournal service, though having a larger user base than Wordpress.com and being equally free to use, is also relatively free of spam blogs. He [...]