James Robertson blogs about the blog spam problem and how software homogeneity doesn't help. At the end he says:

I don't have a solution, other than suggesting that you take "the road less traveled" in selecting blog server software. The trouble is, that mostly requires a level of technical literacy beyond the reach and/or interest of the vast majority of people.

...and that's exactly it. The "road less travelled" is usually too complicated for most people. MovableType (MT) is fairly straightforward to install even if you know almost nothing about Linux or the Apache web server you host it on. You get your hand held the whole way through the MT install and it's why I use it. The popular tools are often popular exactly because while solving the user's problem they are also relatively easy to install and use.

I agree that the popularity of a piece of software makes it a more attractive target and in the early stages of being a target that sometimes makes the software unusable or a PITA to maintain. But MT and MT-Blacklist (protects against blog spam) are at the level of maturity now that if you have MT-Blacklist installed you are fairly well covered. Sure, this takes education and maintenance of the blacklist on the MT admin's part, but it's getting much better than it was just six months ago.

It's amazing that with all of the talk of blog spam not many people mention the *real problem* that blog comment spams exploit: Google rankings. If Google didn't hold blog spams in such high regard there would be less benefit to blog spamming. Yes, people can also click on links in blog comment spams but they are usually on old less-travelled entries anyway. The main goal of blog spam is to improve the linked site's Google PageRank by being associated with a page that already has a high PageRank.

I've noticed this on my own site. The entries that get spammed the most are the ones that I get the most Google referrals from. It's almost as if the blog spammers do a Google search for my blog and take the top of the pile. Being referred by a page with a high PageRank is better, and blog spammers know this.

What can Google do about it? Recognize URLs that are used in blog spams and penalize the site's Google ranking accordingly, just like search engines used to do when pages overused META tags and keywords years ago. Google could maintain their own human-moderated black list (or penalty list) for this purpose, just like MT-Blacklist does.

What's the benefit to Google? It improves the integrity of their search results because people will have one less way of exploiting the PageRank algorithms. Google has a vested interest in returning search results that haven't been exploited for monetary gain. That's the kind of honest ("don't be evil") technology Google has built its business on, and why people trust Google at all. Here I'm asking Google: don't let other people be evil either.