Via Jeneane Sessum I jumped onto Doc's thread about the splog problem and his supposition that its ultimate roots lie deeper inside the homogeny and monoculturalism in the tech world. He raises some interesting questions I'd love your feedback on: Do you think Google has become a monoculture in search and advertising both? How big is the problem of link devaluation, and can the splog problem be solved by rethinking the concept of page-rank? And more largely — how do we take concrete steps to move towards polyculture in search, in advertising, in the workplace, in the tech industry?

Chris Pirillo is hopping mad about a recent swarm of search spam coming from one rather conspicious domain: blogspot.com. The accusation is that, for whatever reason, it's far too easy for spammers to send posts through the Blogger system, leading to thousands of splogs spewing search spam on various keywords. One suggestion is to add a captcha hoop before posts are made live, as Blogger has done with comments. The other suggestion is, um, a bit less favorable — kill Blogger altogether. Anyone else have thoughts on this issue? Are you seeing a sudden influx of spam in any of your subscribed searches?

The Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General is on the hunt for one Leo Kuyeyev, leader of the "Internet Spam Gang" who received a crackdown this week from a Boston judge who fined the illegal spam operation $37 million. Attorney General Tom Reilly brought the suit against Kuvayev and six others with ties in Massachusetts in May, and civil charges were brought against the group this week in order to quickly shut down the spam ring. U.S.-based ISPs have since shut down the Kuvayev operation, which is charged with sending millions of messages soliciting online users with illegal products ranging from counterfeit drugs and pirated software to porn, phony designer watches, and mortgage loans. Kuvayev and one other member of the group are believed to be in Russia; the whereabouts of the remainder of the group are unknown.

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!