I got an email from Alan last night mentioning that his blog was actually knocked offline by the overzealous actions of spammers. They were hammering his site so hard that his host had to kill the site. He had been running the CogDogBlog on some graciously donated webspace, so it's understandable that they weren't thrilled about the load that spammers can add to a server.
Unfortunately, Alan's got a Day Job™ which is currently in conference management mode (i.e., traveling and busy) so he'll be trying to get things back up and running in the few spare milliseconds he can eke out in the next little while.
Yet another reason why Google needs to step up and show some serious corporate responsibility in helping to actually solve the spam problem created by Adsense. Come ON, Google, what's it going to take? How many billions of spamments need to be inflicted on blogs, wikis, and other open web spaces before you'll act?
I've outlined some potential ways to solve the problem, but curiously never heard from Larry or Sergey.