If you're an affiliate marketer, a blog can be a powerful tool. On the one hand, you can use a blog as your primary affiliate portal. On the other hand, you can install a blog on a sub-page of your already existing affiliate marketing portal and use it to generate contextual traffic. Furthermore, the blogging basics for affiliate marketers are not exactly rocket science.

If you start blogging, though, one thing that you're to have to deal with is blog spam. This has become more and more of problem for bloggers as of late. Indeed, the spam bots are becoming increasingly versatile.

The thing is that blogging is like a conversation. So when the spam bots start spamming your comments, you shouldn't deactivate comments. Fortunately, however, a new anti-spam technology is now available to all bloggers.

Back in July, when I attended DemoCamp Montreal 3, I came back with some footage of some of the presentation. Amongst the innovators presenting were the developers of Defensio, an anti-spam technology. There is a Wordpress plugin and the API is open so that it can be adapted to any other CMS.More to the point, I filmed their presentation on how it works (video clip embedded blow).

After meeting the Defensio guys, I installed the private-beta Wordpress plugin on my personal vlog and was pretty much blown away by its efficiency. Well, both the plugin and the open-API are now available to the public, and you don't have to take my word on just how good it is. I've summed up some of the good press that it has received below.

Movable Type Developer forum: Byrne Reese

I think Matthieu and team who built Defensio have done a great job. I really like the feature that spam exists on a spectrum of spaminess. I think Akismet does an excellent job, but I have always thought its binary nature to be insanely myopic. Of course I don’t think Akismet creators saw a value in such fine grained detail.

Defensio on the other hand did. They realized that spam sorted by date is far less useful then spam sorted by spaminess. [...]

Second, I really like the idea of color coding spam to help me even further identify that spam that exists on the fringes of spam [...]

TechCrunch: Defensio Sorts Blocked Comments by “Spaminess”

Defensio boasts a few features lacking in Akismet, most notably the ability to sort your blog’s blocked comments by “spamminess” so you don’t have to wade through them chronologically to find false positives. Defensio will rank comments that it labels as spam according to how likely it thinks the comments are indeed spam [...]

Defensio also adapts to the content of your blog so that it can target spam more effectively. [...]

Among Defensio’s other innovations is an open API that makes the blocker available for use with non-blogging applications.

easywordpress: Defensio - The Real Spam Killer Has Arrived

To track and kill those smart spams, a new spam killer has arrived, it is Defensio. Defensio is now a new more smarter spam fighter Wordpress plugin which not only catches spam on the basis on some blacklisted keywords but also on there nature and style.

Montreal Gazette: Defensio goes after blog spam

Here's how it works: Search engines like Google rank a website's importance partly based on how popular it is. The more pages link to a website, the higher it's listed in search results. So spammers program computers to leave comments in blogs with links to spammy websites in the hope of tricking Google.

Depending who you ask, 90 to 95 per cent of all blog comments are spam. Some bloggers are even disabling comments in frustration. Consensus in the blogosphere holds that a blog without comments defeats the purpose.

ProBlogger: Defensio Launches - a Competitor for Akismet

While I’ll continue to use and support Akismet I’m glad to see someone else enter the market and my hope is that both tools will continue to improve and provide bloggers with tools to stamp out the destructive force of comment spam.

For those of you who desire a human explanation of how Defensio works, however, here's the video I shot of the Defensio team at DemoCamp Montreal 3 back in: