Splogs: Wreaking havoc in the blogosphere

...that 5.8 percent of new blogs overall, or about 50,000 posts on average, are fake or potentially fake.

Google criticised
Some affected bloggers complained that Google was to blame. "Google: Kill BlogSpot Already!" Pirillo wrote in his blog on Monday.

"BlogSpot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your brand is going to go down with it," he wrote. "If your motto truly is to do no evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck."

In his frustration, Pirillo created a short video with screenshots showing him scrolling past the hundreds of splog listings in the PubSub RSS feed folder in his in-box.

Google's Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger, said Google has been working to address the splog problem for a while, instituting precautions such as allowing users to flag suspicious blogs as potential fakes and prompting blog creators to manually transcribe distorted words to verify that the blog was created by a human and not a machine.

Goldman admitted that the weekend attack showed that those preventative tools are "broken" and serve as deterrents rather than outright solutions. He also said Google launched a feature on Wednesday that would force suspected spammers to transcribe distorted words before pushing through individual blog posts. And he said Google is not alone in being attacked.

"Weblogs in general are having a problem with spam right now, not just Blogger," he said. "While it is a problem, it is certainly not the majority case on BlogSpot, at all."

Wyman said Blogger-BlogSpot and other blogging services should do more to monitor postings to keep spammers out. However, he defended Google, saying the company's blogging service was an easy target because it is simple to use, has an open API and is free.

"They've done a good job," he said. "That's the reason this is happening."