Matt Haughey explains how spammers are exploiting Blogspot by using scripts to create Blogspot accounts that link to their Web sites and in turn raise their position in Google. (Ironic considering that Blogspot is owned by Google.) There’s no reason why criminals couldn’t take this one step further. Let’s say you have files you want to share but you don’t want them traced back to you. First you take over somebody’s PC, then you run a program on that PC to create a bogus Blogspot account and post your files to that account so that they can be shared. You’ve now got this anonymous content out there. Theoretically, it’s not going to last long, because the content is illegal.

How do your cohorts keep up with where these files are currently shared? The weblog infrastructure comes through here as well, courtesy of tags or basic search terms. Every time you create a new weblog because the old one was shut down, you put the same bogus phrase on it (something along the lines of “nigritude ultramarine” will do), then submit it to Technorati. Tell your cohorts to keep searching Technorati for that phrase to find out where your illegal content currently resides. (They can even subscribe to an RSS feed for that search.) Perhaps more simply, create a tag nobody else will use on del.icio.us and continually post the current location of your content to it. Or if you’re afraid of people using automated tools to keep track of your sites, use captcha to obfuscate your URLs as parts of images and post them to a particular tag over at Flickr. The possibilities are endless.