Via Jeneane Sessum I jumped onto Doc's thread about the splog problem and his supposition that its ultimate roots lie deeper inside the homogeny and monoculturalism in the tech world. He raises some interesting questions I'd love your feedback on: Do you think Google has become a monoculture in search and advertising both? How big is the problem of link devaluation, and can the splog problem be solved by rethinking the concept of page-rank? And more largely — how do we take concrete steps to move towards polyculture in search, in advertising, in the workplace, in the tech industry? ...

Dave Sifry has posted October's state of the blogosphere, part 1, which largely documents the continued growth in the space. With 70,000 new blogs created each day (that's a new blog each second), the total number of blogs continues to double about once every five months. This report also takes a look at spam blogs, finding that from two to eight percent of newly created blogs are splogs, and about 5.8% (50,000 posts per day) of the total posting volume is accounted for by fake blogs. The recent spate of spam attacks is apparently not the result of any increase in frequency of splog posts, but reflects a change in the splog keyword strategy to include a list of popular search terms which included bloggers' names — which explains why suddenly everyone's ego searches are turning up nothing but spam. Considering the resulting outcry and new focus on getting rid of this crap, let's hope the spammers have perhaps met some of their last keywords, eh? ...

Chris Pirillo is hopping mad about a recent swarm of subscribed search spam coming from one rather conspicious domain: blogspot.com. The accusation is that, for whatever reason, it's far too easy for spammers to send posts through the Blogger system, leading to thousands of splogs spewing search spam on various keywords. One suggestion is to add a captcha hoop before posts are made live, as Blogger has done with comments. The other suggestion is, um, a bit less favorable — kill Blogger altogether. Anyone else have thoughts on this issue? Are you seeing a sudden influx of spam in any of your subscribed searches? ...

'Tis the season for acquisitions, it seems (ahem). The latest is the news that VeriSign has acquired the assets of Dave Winer's weblogs.com pinging service for a price of $2.3 million. They appear to have seen the future of the web, and that future is pings. As such, they'll be throwing resources and infrastructure at weblogs.com, already straining under the weight of its ever-growing daily pingage. They're committing to preserving Dave's vision for the service in the following four areas: keeping it free, open, solid, and informative. Additional plans sound like they're going to involve tackling the spam blog (i.e. splog. Non-techies accusing us technogeeks of confusing, nonsensical jargon? I don't see it.) problem. Vaya con dios with that, VeriSign. ...

ActorTracker.com is a very impressive mashup of feeds from TV talk shows, movies and more mixed with affiliate links for videos and other memorabilia concerning your favorite actors.  Most commercially oriented mashups seem a step away from cheesy splogs, but this one is very nice.  Many features and a nice aesthetic let you know that the people behind ActorTracker spent a lot of time on it.  Unfortunately, there appears to be some problem with the  MyTracker feature, as I'm not able to log in to accounts I create. The site has been around for awhile, but it may take some time before mass media loving consumer audiences are comfortable dealing with data like persistent search results and the like.  If and when that day comes, the right marketing (and a log in proccess that works) could put this site in a good place to get many users.  The service has an unintimidating interface, including e-mail subscription for new results.  It's a good example of the way that RSS could ...