Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won’t be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it’s time for Google to get on top of this. They’re both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. —Dave Winer —[Google and Splogs] (Scripting News)

Winer is talking about how spammers have started creating their own fake blogs (“splogs”), which they populate with links drawn from Google, and which they create on Google’s free blog service. While Google doesn’t really notice the traffic on its huge servers, the holy PageRank is being defiled.

Let’s hope Google does something about it. Maybe every so often asking a blogger to do one of those wiggly word puzzles, and if the blogger declines or fails more than a reasonable number of times, blocking the whole blog from Google’s pagerank.