Of course no sooner that I wrote a slightly more positive spin on a particular spammer (Amir Gans, the top Israeli spammer, courtesy of the MIT Technology Review blog), another bad consequence of spamming came to light. 

A few months ago, I discovered an interesting blog listing site called Blizg.  According to its own old "raison d'etre", Blizg was "created out of a desire to use blog metadata in interesting ways. We want to seek out and understand the relationships between and among blogs. We want to help you find blogs of interest."   Meta tag content was indeed a great way to connect like-minded bloggers.

Unfortunately, the site went down late last year (around December sometime?) and I always wondered why (thought it might have been lack of funding).  So I went on a fishing expedition to discover what went wrong.  And I finally found the answer on Blog Cafe: spamming.  Brandon Stone, the webmeister of Blizg, had to shut it down because of the incredible amount of spam the site was getting.  He did not have the time and/or resources to clean that mess up.  It is sad that spammers infiltrate every corner of blogsphere, including a unique site such as Blizg.  I hope Brandon comes back with a new site name and a bit more security to prevent that next time.