Okay, is there really that much money in comment spam? I mean, especially if the bloggers delete the comments when they come in?

And I'm more than a little skeptical about the spam slave labor market. Whatever the margins, they've got to be less than gambling, prostitution, drug running, etc. that organized crime are ordinarily into.

Bryan, I'm with you as far as failing to see the value in comment spam. Maybe I'm guilty of stereotyping, but I would think that 99.999% of bloggers are never going to do anything with such spam but delete it and ban the originating IP address. As far as the "slave labor market" issue, I had never heard of that before. It seems a little hysterical...but still interesting to contemplate.

Off-the-cuff thoughts:

Well, we know it's automated to some degree. I got 56 identical ones on Sunday, in the space of seconds. That's wacky.

I think the profit/margin/value part comes from driving up the Google page rank, and roping in non-blog-readers for that first click. That only happens if bloggers don't delete the spam between Google spiders of the blog.

With things like Technorati, the Ecosystem, and Blogdex, it's not at all hard to find the high-traffic places that can influence the Google page rank, and target them.

Which might mean that sooner or later Google ropes off blogs from the page-rank and primary search code. Wouldn't be hard to do, but I wonder at the reaction of the internet as a whole if they do that.

Lots of time-wasting possibilities flow from this -- back to work, Chaffin. Yes, sir!

Scott, your report of the spam-bomb on Sunday was interesting, because I experienced the same thing on Saturday evening (84 messages...three different subjects repeated 28 times each) and Sunday evening (50 or so; I didn't bother to count 'em this time). I wondered if it was a widespread thing, or if I had just gotten really lucky!

Prior to Google acquiring Blogger, a good case could be made for it removing blogs from its primary search results. Now that its got some skin in the game...? Well, I don't know.

I think I'd like to see 'em put a switch on the search page...include/exclude blogs in results...to give us the option, depending on what we're looking for. Haven't thought it through, though.