VeriSign purchased Weblogs.com, the blog pinging service brainchild of Dave Winer, for $2.3 million, with one of the expressly stated goals listed as entering the fight against spam blogs (or splogs, as they're not so affectionately known). The number of splogs is currently growing at a faster rate than regular blog growth, according to Michael Graves, techno-evangelist (wicked job title!) at VeriSign. He indicates that combating blog spam faces many of the same challenges currently plaguing the email world in its own struggle against spam, and goes on to posit that "many will want to take advantage of filtering services in much the same way that mail users see value in spam filters for their email inbox." I imagine the first item on VeriSign's agenda will be to shore up the infrastructure of Weblogs.com, currently struggling under the weight of upwards of two million pings per day — but I, for one, will welcome the efforts of our splog-fighting overlords once they put some weight behind it — and the sooner the better!