The Washington Post has a wonderful article today on Clickfraud today, detailing the brazen institutionalization of how certain shadow companies are “gaming” Google Adsense for mega bucks.

[NOTE: I blogged about this over at BlogHerald, where I asked "When will Wall Street take notice of a company, where up to 30% of their revenue might be fraudulent?"] I saw “wonderful”, because I think its great when off-line media begin to notice the shennanigans of on-line hi-jinks. It brings more discussion into the fold, and really puts forces people to start asking good questions about company practices.

I think it caps an interesting few weeks in the Blogosphere, actually.

Bloggers around the blogosphere tend to take umbrage at the idea that anything taints their own ecosystem of thoughts and ideas; perhaps this is leftover from a ‘techie’ idealism that extends from Usenet or BBS days where, although flame wars were not uncommon, most people were welcome to share their thoughts — and were evaluated on the merit of their opinion.

The idea of commercialism and profiteering was crass, and at the other spectrum of the very ethos which permeated all conversations.

At the expense of sounding like a crotchety old fart bemoaning “the good ol’ days” (when 14.4k modems were fast — yes, that wasn’t that long ago!), it is a pity that the level and value of those conversations are growing dimmer, dumber, and stupider with each passing day.

No — its got nothing to do with bloggers who are creating wonderful content, engaging each other on any number of passionate topics, and otherwise connecting in a real and “authentic” way.

It does have to do with the blogosphere being, yes, a victim of its success. Eyeballs are traffic, which when you aggregate enough, is money.

With this simple equation, we’ve seen the crass, clumsy and heavy-handed attempts by online marketers to tap into this rich well of human ideas and thought (of course, not all are worth such descriptions, but forgive me — I’m on an old crotchety man-type rant).
If PayPerPost is the virus infecting healthy blogs turning them into shills, and if Flogs, goggs, and sockpuppet bloggers are like the artificially green plastic plants someone has snuck into their lawn, then surely Google Adwords must be the rich loam where splogs form.

Splogs … the ugliest polluters in the blogosphere are the weeds choking attention, stealing content, and sucking the reputation out of all bloggers alike.

Its the incredible ease that any Yahoo (pun not intended) can put up a blog, fill it with crap, and then submit it to Adwords that drives the entire industry of splogs. According to some accounts, the splogosphere is growing at a faster rate than the blogosphere. See the wired article for a great account on this.

What does Google do to find and root out these Machivellian malefactors? Not much, apparently.

Why isn’t their more blogospheric outrage at this darling of Silicon Valley? Well, the WaPo article makes a few good points:

Big advertisers are pushing search engines behind the scenes to fight click fraud more aggressively, but many are afraid to criticize them publicly because they wield such clout. “Sixty percent of new customers come through Google. [Advertisers] can’t afford to upset that channel, regardless of whether there’s fraud,” said Jason Clement, an associate director at Carat Fusion, a New York ad agency.

Personally, I think its tough to hate something as nerd-centric as Google. How unpopular would you be if you called out the most popular kid in school? Its hard, I know.

But quite frankly, in this meme of seemingly perpetual outrage, we should include Google in the same group as PayPerPost, and Edelman as a host of companies guilty of contributing to the gaming the blogosphere, and polluting the quality of conversation that makes it compelling.

What’s the charge? Making splogs so easy to proliferate and so profitable that its hard for people NOT to get involved.