Germany: Blogspam Comes of Age

German newsweekly 'Der Spiegel' reports in its online edition that massive blogspamming is believed to have taken place in the marketing of new fragrances to the German blog community.

The report says that five real world avatars have been created by a Frankfurt online agency who subsequently flood-commented boards using strings like "in2", which coincidentially is part of the "ck-IN2U" brand.

The obviously very good looking real world avatars have user accounts at MySpace Germany as well as Flickr.com. While one might argue that blog spamming is a phenomenon that was to be expected, according to reports by German bloggers and MySpace users the authors behind the avatars obviously get involved with other users up to a point of arranging blind dates which of course do not take place. The question asked by some bloggers is whether such behavior doesn't clearly step over the red line.

'Der Spiegel' quotes popular German blogger Robert Basic as saying that he felt "used".  The trials by the German online agency seem to be pretty crude to this point in that Robert Basic says that some comments even still contain uncleaned Word file metadata.

Even so, the incident shows that more subtle forms of advertising are being developed, making another kind of viewer discretion on the Web ever more urgent.