So who had done this? The junk filter had recorded their IP (internet) address. It resolved to somewhere in India. Which rang a bell: earlier this year, I spoke with someone who does blog spamming for a living - a very comfortable living, he claimed. But he said that the one thing that did give him pause was the possibility that rival blog spammers might start paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas: they could always use a bit of western cash, would have the spare time and, increasingly, cheap internet connections to be able to do such tedious (but paid) work.

A few days later I read a stunning report by George Packer in the New Yorker magazine - regrettably, it's not online - about the sprawling mega- city of Lagos in Nigeria. It's the world's sixth largest city, and growing fast; the concept of urban planning has collapsed and life is eked out from the margins of existence. Corruption isn't an occasional hazard; it underpins a near-feudal society. While there, Packer was approached by one of his guides, who offered him the promise of riches looted from a despot; the classic Nigerian scam.

Packer declined politely, attaching no blame to his would-be scammer: "He would have been regarded locally as a fool if he hadn't tried to exploit [me]," he noted without rancour. Elsewhere this week, deliveries began of the hand-powered laptop, Nicholas Negroponte's computing gift to the developing world.

I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.

"It is like pollution," said Mark Frauenfelder, the founder and co-editor of Boing Boing, who also writes a personal blog at MadProfessor.net. "It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out."

But Robert Scoble, whose "Scobleizer--Microsoft Geek Blogger" is hosted on the WordPress.com service, said he is happy with the filtering there.

The Scobleizer blog gets around 10,000 visits a day, and about 400 comments are left on the blog daily. Of those, 100 are spam, Scoble said. Most of these are flagged correctly. However, there are also false positives, valid reader comments identified as unwanted postings, he said.

"We've built technology to solve the problem, we invest in updating it, and our 160-plus bloggers manage the few spams that get through," Weblogs CEO Jason Calacanis said. "The only spam that can really get through our defenses are the ones that are hand-rolled by a person, and we catch most of those."

You're making it into this major problem. If you have the right software and you put in simple rules it's not a major issue. The problem is the software makers, combined with blog owners, have not done a horrible good with their software. If you put in simple controls the problem goes away. Folks just don't install the tools to block comment spam.

Whats a splog? A splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value. Im sure some might argue that packaging data, such as news feeds or the blog posts of others is added value. I dont think it is. After all, thats why there are topics and indexes. If I want information about the Dallas Mavericks, I can search for it, optimize it, and save it. Because indexes are based on freshness, my searches are automatically updated, freshest data first, as new posts are introduced.

How many splogs are there and how many posts do they carry? Its difficult to quantify, but I wouldnt be shocked if we have excluded more than 1mm of them at IceRocket.

If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com's, and other search engines' indexes increases. Its not just blogspot.com, pretty much 90plus percent of blogs hosted on .info sites are splogs as well.

The sun is shining, birds are singing, and I'm sitting on the couch deleting the 62 trackback spams that have arrived since yesterday. For now, these spams are easy to spot. They're mostly about online poker and miracle drugs, and they make no attempt to look authentic. From our experience with email spammers, you can bet that two things will happen. They'll continue to rachet up the volume, and they'll fine tune their pitches to blend in with authentic trackbacks.

Don't worry, it's only temporary. It's just that we've all gotten a little tired of spending so much time deleting comment spam and dealing with trolls and all that "first post!" crap, so we're switching off comments on new posts for the next day or two while we think about what we're going to do to try and make the comment boards not completely sucky. This was the first morning in months where I didn't have to spend the first 45 minutes of my day deleting spam and banning trolls, and I can't say that I hated it.