The great blog arms race
Spammers have automated tools to spam blog comments. Blog owners have a number of automated tools to stop them. Spammers set up dummy blogs with the anti-spam tools of the day so they can refine their spamming tools. Blog owners deploy new or updated anti-spam tools to stop the newly refined spamming tools…
All so that a few people can get links to their (completely worthless) websites. Who would have predicted even ten years ago that something as nebulous as hyper links would inspire a technological arms race in the 21st century.
The next arms race?…friends on social media sites. Why? Because friends are votes on social media sites in the same way that links are votes on the web.