Criminals have discovered blogging.

The BBC reports this quite breathlessly, but there's no need to be either surprised or unduly alarmed.

There are two types of scams going on, according to Websense, which was the BBC's source for the story:

1. Blog addresses loaded with malware, advertised via e-mail or IM spam.
   
2. Blog addresses loaded with malware waiting to be tripped by zombie machines.
   

In both these cases you can substitute the words "Web site" for "blog" and pre-date the release to 1997. Free Web page companies found this problem fairly early-on in their evolution, and now those offering space to bloggers need to be aware as well.

While the BBC insists it's up to clients to protect themselves, I think there's some responsibility for blog hosts as well to check their customers. If they do this, they can catch some real criminals and put them away. The evidence will be sitting right on their servers.