Responding to the growing number of spam blogs, or "splogs," Google has taken measures to impede those attempting to use its Blogger service to create and maintain fake blogs, reports MediaPost. Among those measures: "We pushed out a change that will prompt some users to solve a CAPTCHA if our spam classifier identifies the blog as spammy," wrote Blogger Product Manager Jason Goldman on Blogger Buzz. CAPTCHA refers to a visual test - a sequence of letters in a distorted graphic - that computers can't decipher, but people can.

Search engines, blog search engines and net advertisers are apparently working together to eliminate the economic incentive for splogs by identifying them at their source - by domain - and not indexing them.

Technorati CEO and founder David Sifry is quoted as saying that splogs are an inevitable part of the blogosphere: "Every health ecosystem has parasites. The really big question here, though, is - is it manageable?" He adds: "This is a larger issue of how can you deal with the fact that you've built an open system.…We want to make it easy to let people create content - but still enforce a good level of accountability and reputation."