Spammers Clog Up the Blogs

If the maturity of a Web technology can be measured by the amount of attention spammers pay to it, then blogging has definitely come of age. After a wave of aggressive spam attacks this month, bloggers suddenly found themselves scrambling for antispam weaponry and confronting the questions that have bedeviled e-mail and Usenet for years. How much openness can blogs afford? What freedoms are bloggers willing to trade to keep spammers out? The problem of blog spam is not entirely new. Last year “referral marketers” began inserting their clients’ URLs into bloggers’ referral logs. Around the same time, bloggers began reporting spam occasionally popping up in the public comments on their sites. Until recently, however, comment spam posed little more than an occasional nuisance. But after blogger Jay