Hmm, Steve Rubel mentioned New Stats on Spam in the Blogosphere by the eBuity Group that places the nexus of Blog Spam in Mountain View, Washington DC and San Francisco.
"… Most spam blogs are still hosted in the US. We ranked IPs associated with spam blogs based on their frequency of pings, and located them using ARIN.
1. Mountain View, CA 2. Washington DC 3. San Francisco, CA 4. Orlando, FL 5. Lansing, MI Blogspot hosts the highest number of splogs, but we also found that most of the other top hosts where physically hosted in the US. Perhaps Jonathan Bailey knows more about the legal ramifications."
Gee…. most of the time, when I get visitors to Webmetricsguru.com from Mountain View, they're coming from Google!
Hmm, could it be that blog spammers are housed nearby the GooglePlex? Maybe the spammers are in the Googleplex (nah - just having fun with this).
Maybe the spammers also hang out around Silicon Valley and the goverment buildings in Washington. Nah……
Interesting study though - here's some more insights:
"….56% of all pinging blogs are spam. By collapsing these pings to their respective blogs, we chart the distribution of authentic blogs against splogs. These numbers have seen no change, 56% of all pinging blogs are splogs.
And MySpace.com is the "Mother of Blogging" now - eclipsing in growth the amount of blog spam.
"… MySpace is now the biggest contributor to the blogosphere. The other key driver LiveJournal and blogs managed by SixApart (as seen at their update stream) contribute only 50-60% of what MySpace does. The growth of MySpace blogs has in fact dwarfed the growth of splogs! Further if MySpace is discounted in our analysis close to 84% of all pings are spings! Though MySpace is relatively splog free, we are beginning to notice splogs, something blog harvesters should keep an eye on. [Note that not all blogspot blogs ping weblogs.com]
