it amounts to a Distributed Spam Attack that requires considerable effort to repel. I'm not sure there are too many sites with the talent necessary to beat this crap back.

IMHO if it had not been for someone we'd probably still be working in shifts. Well, probably with ceebs and linca we'd have been able to come up with a technical patch but I suspect it would have taken much longer.

The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.

It's Amway for netizens. I wonder when $cientology will discover it.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

This is very interesting to me because I overheard someone at dinner this weekend talking about their little shop doing very well in internet sales because they now had people who could get their website to come up first or second in websearches of certain key terms.  I figured there had to be tricks involved, but I've never heard many of these terms before--black hat, white hat, etc.  It makes sense that once you know the logic of the search engines that you could game the system.  When you consider that those in, say, the top three spots are going to get all the traffic and make serious money, potentially, there is huge incentive to do anything and everything to get your website into one of those top spots.

The potential for damage to sites like ET by hordes burning down the forests to get the beach seems pretty significant.

It may really limit the use of the web in the future.  Or, create the need for castles and moats where smaller "boutique" blogs can gain protection and share the services of a swat team as seems to exist here at ET, to beat back these disturbers.

As I think of it, already academia and big business have IT departments that are dealing with this stuff day in and day out.

But apparently these tricks work, and there is a lot of money to be made, so it is not going to stop any time soon, and will probably just get more sophisticated.  As will the defenses.