Blog, Chat and Instant Message Spam - It's Not All Email

What makes spam so appealing to advertisers is that it costs them nearly nothing. The burden of the cost falls upon ISPs and end-users. In some cases the expenses are even paid by non-consenting victims who had their computers hacked. With the price of, "free" it shouldn't be surprising that spam is spreading.

"Blog comment spam," is where advertisements usually containing links are posted to other people's weblogs or, "blogs". The placing of the spam message is usually handled by automated software.

In an alternate form of blog spam, the entire blog itself is created as an advertisement. Again, often automated software is used to create dozens or hundreds of blogs. An affiliate advertisement program may be used in an effort to generate revenue from visitors. The blog itself may generate traffic by having its content optimized for search services such as Yahoo! or MSN.

Wiki spam is a close relative of blog spam. A Wiki is a website where anyone can collaboratively participate in building a document. Wikipedia is a project to create an entire encyclopedia in this method. Wiki's are "spammed," when an author ads commercial links or articles to a Wiki not intended for such content.

Chat and Instant Message spam are fairly intuitive. A piece of software known as a "robot" or, "bot" is used to send messages to number of IM addresses or chat room participants. Often, the bot will attempt to fool the recipient that they are actually a human. The goal of this spam is to get the user to visit a website offering a service.

Since each of these technologies are more proprietary and less reliant on open standards than our current email system is, it should be easier to shutdown the spammers. A staged upgrade to AOL's instant messenger protocol shouldn't be impractical if it could include the ability to stop unwanted messages. In contrast, radical changes to the email system seem almost inconceivable.

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