Spam is the cockroach of the advertising world, adaptable to many environments.

Weblogs are inexpensive to produce, and show up well on the big search engines. Thus the inevitable birth of the spam blog, a.k.a. splog, an automated Web site that mimics the appearance of a weblog in order to lure traffic.

It's a problem for search-engine credibility and the nascent blog-advertising market, because splogs distort traffic counts and water down the value of weblogs in general.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas-based IceRocket search engine, sparked interest in the problem with a post at his own blog in August. "Anything that has ever been spammed about is spammed in monstrous proportions in the blogosphere because it's so easy to do," he wrote.

"Splogs are coming at us left and right. We are killing off thousands a day, but they keep on coming. Like zombies. It's straight from Night of the Living Dead. Brain-dead splogs. Coming at us by the thousands."

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