Is CNN spamming a blog near you?

Is CNN spamming your blog?
Comment Spam isn't just for the Viagra salesmen anymore as CNN seems to have sunk to their level. Nick Lewis InfoBlog lays out some pretty hefty evidence of CNN spamming on blogs.

This week, CNN broke ground as the first news network to attempt a viral marketing campaign in the blogosphere. Operatives from CNN targeted an unknown number of mid-to-high level bloggers to receive guerrilla comment spam. In total, 10 of these spams have been varified so far; all of them appear on blog posts that focus on CNN. Perhaps the most shocking find is that CNN may have left malicious keywords at least three blogs with the intent of using google's keyword stuffing detectors to censor them.

In other words, Nick Lewis is not only accusing CNN of spamming, but also of keyword stuffing, that oh-so passe practice which went out of style years ago when the search engines caught onto it, and even malicious keyword stuffing that could knock these blogs down from their top spots on google. That's not just spam-nasty, that's sabotage nasty.

Catch 22 comment on Lewis' page: "So haven't you started a buzz about cnn by posting this?". Ouch. We're damned all the way around these days. ;)

Via Metafilter, where the word astroturfing now has officially evolved into Ashleeturfing, due to that earlier Ashlee Simpson incident.