Spam blogs, sometimes called “splogs,” are phony blogs set up to earn money by displaying ads. Splogs steal content from other sites so that they appear to the untrained eye as genuine blogs. When people conduct web searches, that stolen content drives traffic to the site, raising the revenue from advertising.

It’s a sleazy practice, and at times, I’ve seen posts from this site appear on splogs. Recently, I found a splog that copies text from this site, but it also does something new: it changes certain words in the post to modify the content slightly.

This page copied part of a post called Am I a Fair-Weather Friend of Free Speech?

I realize that by linking to the splog, I am helping them achieve their goal of increased traffic. Still, it’s an interesting development in the evolution of spam, and it seems worthy of note.