The good folks at Technorati are hosting a summit on defeating “web spam”.

If you’ve never heard of comment spam, link spam or trackback spam, then chances are you don’t operate a blog with commenting features.* If you are living with this crap, then I’ll spare you my diatribe on the tragedy of the commons — along with my increasingly violent daydreams involving the “Texas Hold’em” spammer — and simply say that I hope to hell these very large brains come up with something.

But I’m not sure how much hope to hold out. The page with the announcement is, yes, covered in comment spam. (Cue Alanis.)

* The short explanation is that spammers look for blogs where they can leave public comments, and leave countless messages linking to sites selling prescription drugs or offering online gambling. The goal isn’t to have you click on those links. It’s to boost the sites’ ranking in search engines like Google, which tend to rate sites highly if a lot of other web sites link to them. Sweeping your blog free of these things is a colossal time-consuming pain in the ass — and on commercial blogs, that translates to costs and lost productivity.