Early last year, I wrote about my battle with spam e-mails. Now say hello to splogs (”spam blogs”), the latest way for spammers to annoy you and degrade the utility of the internet:

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you’ll see there’s something very odd about the blog’s content: It’s very familiar. Too familiar.

That’s because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn’t make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you’re the victim.

“Splogs,” or spam blogs, are the latest way for spammers to manipulate the blogosphere for profit. The phenomenon hit an all-time high recently, when Google’s blog-hosting service, Blogger, was inundated with more than 13,000 fake blogs spawned by a script (all have since been taken down).

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While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to the individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. “What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs?” said Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome. “It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for.”