Today I got like a couple dozen blog spam messages. Nothing new there. What is interesting when I dug deeper, however, is that this didn’t look like a commercial attempt to get traffic. Yes, the same three URLs were in all the messages, but what this appeared to be is a means of being annoying. But not to annoy me. This spam was meant to be annoying to the linked sites.

Bloggers are in an ongoing war with blog spammers, trying to find any means of making the process simple and automated. One method is to develop a blacklist of sites and terms. By having a lot of bloggers report on spam messages, an automatic database of spam-related messages can be generated, off which keywords can be determined and a blacklist can be generated. What results is a handy filter for those who don’t want to be bothered with blog spam. Simple enough.

Except in this case. By seeding these three legitimate blogs, what this person was trying to do was to get these blogs blacklisted. It was reverse warfare: turn the tools of defense against the defenders. But why just these three blogs? No idea.

However, this is the most annoying sort of blog spam, even more annoying than the commercial posts. This is simply malicious, with no benefit to anyone. No one is building traffic, just ill will. Thanks a lot, jerk.