Lately the number of spam comments on this blog has started to become unbearable, almost as bad as the number of junk emails crowding my old Yahoo account.

To better understand the size of the spam problem, I did a quick search for market data on the size of the spam problem on the Web.

The results are frightening:

- 83% of US emails or 52% of UK emails are spam (The Register)

- 81% of all blog comments are spam (Akismet)

- 80% of incoming blog pings (a.k.a. trackbacks) are spam (Wordpress)

- 30% of new blogs are spam-oriented according to Intelliseek, or 2-8% according to Technorati (Mediapost)

Spam is one of the reasons why we no longer use IRC chat channels and newsgroups, our first ways of group conversation online. Today, spam is already a daily annoyance on our email systems and threatens the success of Web 2.0.

Over the next days, I will be reviewing a number of anti-spam solutions for blogs.

As always, I look forward to receiving your thoughts, feedback or links…