Ok, I goofed. I fell for one of the postings in the "services" section that promised useful reasonable comment links. It felt like a nice way to advertise my business. Unfortunately, they spammed. So now I have a site that can't comment onto other sites... cause it seems to be blocked -- at least on some sites -- I'm assuming it was akismet. Any way out of this? Does it time out after a while and I just need to be patient? I'm not a spammer. I just made a mistake hiring someone who did Thanks!
Unfortunately you have to be careful who you hire, since you are giving them carte' blanche to directly represent you...so if they spam, then yes, you are a spammer by definition because you gave them permission to act on your behalf. It would be up to individual site owners to remove your web and IP address from their blocked list, which is tough. Most bloggers won't remove a blocked address, since they have been burned by it once. You could try sending emails explaining the situation, but I would just move on, and learn from my mistake. There are a million sites to comment on.
You can try emailing Akismet support - i believe they provide you with an options but as mentioned before me- learn from experience and move on.
Simple: Prove Matt Mullenweg is wrong. Very easy to do but most folks think the man can walk on water and ignore his more interesting traits. http://akismet.com/contact/ Be polite, explain what happened with specifics, and how you learned your lesson.
The best way would probably be to contact Akismet support through that contact form (linked above) and explain what happened. Tons of WordPress blogs use Akismet and don't bother to check their spam queue, so the chances of getting approved on these are very slim. You'll also be blocked on all WordPress.com blogs as well. Oh yeah, and never hire a "blog commenting" service again. Make relevant comments on other blogs in your niche, but be very careful not to look spammy.