A new kind of spam
A number of blogger sites have a list of other sites who refer to them. They're often in place for the webmasters to see how popular they are but these referral lists can be tricked into displaying links to web sites that do not truly link to them. I've noticed the occasional hit to my referrer list, mostly from porn sites and most recently, one from John Kerry's presedential campaign. This is annoying to say the least but has become just another tool in the arsenal of spammers to push their site.
For John Kerry, this seems like an underhanded and detrimental approach to push his campaign, much like the use of e-mail spam. A quick search on Google brings up similar complaints.
Conversation
Yup, the same has been happening to me - not too often thankfully. Mainly porn sites but no wannabe presidents (so far).
Kerry (I'm British so I don't care) can only do himself and his campain harm using referal spam. No-one is going to trust someone who uses underhanded tricks and if he isn't aware of it happening, that doesnt say much for his leadership abilities. If he cant keep tabs on his personal staff, how is he going to keep tabs on a whole country?
Course, the spam COULD have been planted by his opponents trying to dirty his name - but that's a whole other conspiricy theory.
On a brighter note, most blogging software comes with a blacklist feature now and (if like me) you roll your own blog, a quick tweak is probably all that is needed to stop them spamming again.