This will just get you started. Google Blog Yahoo Blog CNET’S 28 Blogs Microsoft Community Blogs See Announcement concerning IBM “Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company.” A Case for Corporate Blogs “51% of the blog readers visit product and/or corporate sites as a result of reading blogs.” Research the benefits of Blogging for Business. I think you will find some strong reasons to begin using this powerful method of building credibility in your business. Corporate Blogging Survey Results Released WebProNews Valuable Blog Survey Results Of the blog readers, 54% form their opinions about products or companies on the basis of blogs. 51% of the blog readers visit product or corporate sites as a results of reading blogs. 58% of the blog readers, read them to find news and information they can’t find otherwise. 57% of them are interested in the personal opinions of the authors, but only 43% are interested in the discussions. “If these results are correct, it’s one of the strongest cases for corporate blogs I’ve seen. What an opportunity to have 57% percent of your readers actually interested in your personal opinion, just to mention one detail.” Follow

The trackback spam I’ve been getting seems to be from an army of zombie spambots. That means they are regular home computers (or even business computers), most of them on broadband ISP lines. What that means, is that those computers will normally not have webservers configured. So any time you come across an IP number in your logs trying to spam you, check if they’ve got a webserver configured. The easiest way to do it is to enter them into your browser and see if they serve up something. But that can be deceptive, so if can, use a tool that shows headers as well. One of my regular spammers is spamming my deprecated B2 installation. Yes, after a few months of using MT. Smart, eh? Anyway, one of the IP numbers I caught appears to be a master spambot: 202.134.0.136 webserver2.telkom.net.id inetnum: 202.134.0.0 - 202.134.3.255 netname: TELKOMNET descr: PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (PT. Telkom) descr: Indonesia What looks like a webserver in Indonesia. Traceroute goes by Singapore. What attracted my attention was these two accesses: POST /blog/archives/000083.html POST /blog/archives/000083.html Very curious. A POST request to some blog entries? Very fishy. So I pulled the IP number, and found a string of accesses to the blog, ranging over the deprecated B2 comment script to blog entries, to actually posting comment spam. The accesses are sporadic and atypical enough so I don’t think this is a zombie. I think it’s a master bot of some kind. Probably a probing bot. It REALLY got interesting when I found that the bot had succeeded in posting a few comment spams before I blocked it. Get this, aside from fidelityfunding, this bot posted URL’s on variations of gb.com, which means one thing: It’s related to Alexander Morozov, whether he’s a real person or a virtual figurehead. That’s the domain spammed with those trackbacks too! I believe the other spambot I caught the other day is related to him too, but this one is as well. While the trackbacks were vile pornographic URL’s, these were the regular gambling, viagra, phentermine, weight loss and mortgage type URL’s. Typical Google search term placement. Incidentally, I also found referral spam peddled by this robot. Same main domain as the trackbacks. You know, this is really weird. Many of the sites in that referral spam are now terminated for misuse of the hosting Follow