Last night, John Chow made a post called Collecting Trackbacks for Fun and Profit. In it, he promotes a somewhat grey-hat program called Trackback Collector, which automates the spamming of blog trackbacks.

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve surely dealt with Trackback spam already. Many of us have just disabled Trackbacks, and that solves the problem. In fact, the old spam plugin we were using even had an option to automatically discard any Trackbacks that came through!

Now, I don’t know if this was a paid post or what, but I think it’s a bit irresponsible for John to promote such a product to his readership! As an authority in the blog world, tens of thousands of people will end up reading this post.

If even 10% of his 75K Feedburner readers decide to try this method out, that’s 7500 people spamming on average 500 blogs. Yes, that’s 3,750,000 “fake” trackbacks generated because of a single post.

Just what the blogosphere needs, more spam. :(