We’ve been working on the problem of identifying splogs (spam blogs) for the past six months. Our studies show that almost 75% of of the blog posts from weblogs.com’s feed and about 25% of fresh posts from a popular blog search engine are from splogs. We’ve been curious about the software used to create and maintain splogs. You don’t have to hang out on secret IRCs to find out about them — all it takes is a little Googling. Filling the Blogosphere with splogs is not illegal yet and there are many software packages to help you set up your own evil splog empire. Here’s information on nine splog packages from hell.

update 08/07/08: I found the missing page in the Internet Archive. We lost some pages (not posts) due to an epic failure last fall. Maybe it and the comments are still in our database somewhere. I’ll look when I have time.