While I was gone (because of a crashed hard drive, vacation and business travel, all in a row), Plagiarism Today posted an excellent article.
It pretty much nails all the issues that are relevant in the splog war today, and as often happens in articles about splog, puts Google right in the middle of things.
Google, however, has been a mixed ally in this matter. Though they took token steps to prevent splogs from being created on their service, those steps have proved inadequate and no further plans have been made.
One of the solutions suggested in the article, which makes sense to me, is cutting back on the automation in the blog world.
Perhaps it’s time that we removed some of the automation from the blogging world. Perhaps pings, trackbacks and comments should come with some form of authorization. Even a simple Hashcash setup, a system by which a user has to take a few seconds to complete a simple task before finishing an action, could go a long way to fix the problem.
It can be a hassle for legitimate bloggers, as was seen when Blogger introduced captchas for posting, it probably is time to start taking more serious steps.