Google Inc.'s free BlogSpot service has become a happy hunting ground for spammers cashing in on the easy integration of AdSense advertisements into the "push-button" publishing tool.

Over the past few days, the situation has spiraled out of control, prompting outrage from bloggers and third-party blog search providers and an acknowledgement from Google that there's a "tricky problem" to be solved.

An automated spam blog (splog) attack over the weekend was first flagged by Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, who accused Google of hosting a "crapfarm" of fake blogs.

At http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1872830,00.asp you can find out more about the "adsense blog" phenomenon.