YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE a denizen of the blog world to understand what a "splog" is, but it won't be long before it enters your lingua franca in the same frame of reference as spam, click fraud, and spyware. A splog is a spam blog--that is, a fake blog that is created for the sole purpose of getting a high search engine "page rank" to reap profits through ad clicks, or to drive customers to an otherwise obscure e-commerce site. Just like e-mail spam, splogs don't take a rocket scientist to create, but can be built by simple automatic scripts or programs that abuse services like Blogspot, Moveable Type, Wordpress, or Google's Blogger.com.

Find out how spammers can set up in minutes an Adsense blog at http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=34217.