I rarely wish harm on anybody. But sometimes I do. Not often, but every so often. Usually when I run across assholes wonderful human beings like these guys: http://www.mytrafficbutler.com/ (paste that URL into a browser; I'm not helping their ranking by legitimately linking to them). To wit:

BLOGS: Other 3rd party sites are in development right now and they plan to charge you a high price for services like this, plus by then, the blog blasting advertising method will be saturated. Start blasting your web site and your ad to thousands of blogs while the advertising method is still new. You'll get noticed by 1000's and get results. Plus, search engines list these and list YOUR AD AND URL.

That's a description of one of the "services" they offer.

This site got posted to fark.com, with a "cool" tag and a headline like "Send thousands of targetted visitors to your site". Another guy on Fark chatted with a customer servcie rep from their site. Here's his actual transcript, which he posted in the thread:

Please wait for a site operator to respond. You are now chatting with 'Winston' Winston: Hello there you: Never in my life have I seen somebody with the nuts to brag about blog spamming as an advertising method. You must be proud. Winston: yeah sometimes it hurts you: Do you stick to the 10k-plus readers metric before you spam, or will you nail the little guys too? Winston: the blogs are owned for the sole purpose of letting others post on them Winston: Im not sure what youre refering to - if its actualy emailing people or what] you: And would you say that the purpose of owning a blog is to have others saturate them with advertising so the discussion they were intended for is rendered impossible? Winston: its for search engines - not for people to read you: That doesn't make it any less detrimental to the people running the blogs, though, does it? Winston: they run them for the sole purpose of letting people post in mass Winston: thats the only thing theyre used for Winston: the owners want it that way you: You don't think they intend for people to post, say, on the topic of the blog itself? Winston: the whole point of it is to post on them in mass - for the purpose of search engine ranking Winston: nothing more you: heh, right. Well, justify it any way you like, I guess. Have fun with that, but you sure as hell won't get my business.

That's abhorrent. And what's really super annoying is that nearly every blog out there runs on software which removes the blog spam temptation from a technical perspective. Spamming a blog doesn't help your ranking. And it can even hurt it!

The sad part is that people actually pay them to do this. The web's been around over ten years now and some folks still don't get it.

UPDATE: The guy who posted the link to Fark actually responded to the posts and said that he had "removed the blog spam service from the site" (probably due to the guy who posted the chat session above, but also maybe from a post I wrote explaining why blog spam is useless). I was composing a reply to his comments, but by the time I hit "send" the article had been deleted. A shame. I had some valid questions for winston7, and was hoping he'd answer them for me. I've never been able to talk directly to one of Satan's minions before, and was looking forward to a rare opportunity...