The researchers said large advertisers were to blame for a significant share of the spam problem.

"Ultimately, it is advertisers' money that is funding the search-spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users' productivity," they write in the paper, which will be presented in May at the International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta.

Mr. Wang, group manager and senior researcher for cybersecurity and systems management at Microsoft, said, "The good guys are part of the problem."

The researchers' specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft's Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.

Each blog posts automatically redirects the searcher to one of a handful of different people search engines that I don't care to link to. People-Search.com is among the most popular. You can spot these and others in dozens of Google Blog Search results for my site and others.

All of these new spam blogs are powered by Google's Blogger platform. However, they are getting indexed by all of the relevant search engines, including as of this writing Technorati. Google needs to put a stop to these immediately. It seems easily remedied if they can mine the blogs for the redirecting code.

Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as "Whirlywinds." I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything.

My first assignment came a few days later. "The topic would be 'colloidal silver,' " Whirlywinds informed me. But then he added a caveat: "Please EXCLUDE any negative comments, as I sell this product online."

Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web. I told Whirlywinds I'd rather pass.

Amazon Connect posts will appear in Amazon customers' personal log or "Plog" in the center column of the Amazon.com home page. Each customer's Plog is different (hence the name), and just like a blog, Plog posts are sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives customers the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender or to respond with their own comments. This feedback loop means that each customer's Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. A Plog will appear only if the customer is logged on to Amazon.com, and if posts relevant to that customer's purchase history have been submitted. In the future, Plogs will also help customers discover products that have just been released, track changes to orders and much more.

What does "VooDoo Blogger" do? I'll only mention one or two. First - "This software will allow you to easily create 1000/s of blogs fast and easy" and second - "Create custom blog clusters for any niche."

Might you be getting the idea that this is somehow related to the Blogspot Splogs you mentioned?

Go back and look at that "Stealth Advertiser" and you'll see a couple of interesting comments about the "advantages" in the FAQ's.

Clearly this issue is bigger than everyone probably is imagining, despite what David Sifry says. This must be solved now. Who besides Mark Cuban is taking the lead on this? The future of the blogosphere is at stake here. This has to be addressed at the publisher level. Does anyone care about this or is everyone busy building new features?

The search giant's Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot hosting service, together the most popular free blogging service on the Web, fell victim this past weekend to the biggest splog attack yet -- an assault that led to clogged RSS readers and overflowing in-boxes, and that may have manipulated search engine rankings.

"Uh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, I think we have an emergency on our hands," Tim Bray, Web technologies director at Sun Microsystems, wrote in his blog in response to what he called the "splogsplosion."

Just how bad is the problem? According to Glance and Kadayam (who count blogs for a living) nearly 30 percent of blog posts today are spam. That's a conservative estimate, they say, and doesn't factor in the net total of spam comments, which could be upwards of 50 percent.

Spam blogs are such a big deal, there's now a word for it: splog. According to Wikipedia, splog content "is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites." Wikipedia further notes, "splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogger service."

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as "splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.

The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to let bloggers create blogs.

I recently launched beta for a simple website called SplogReporter.com where "good willed" bloggers can report sploggers. Verification will then be made on which submitted items are truly splogs. So please bookmark the Splog Reporter site and report any splogs you come across. The goal is to create a master directory of splog URLs to have removed from the search engines. So "good willed" bloggers of the blogosphere, this is your call to arms to rid the blogosphere of splogs.