comment spam

So I'm not exactly sure, but I think my blog has been spammed by someone in Portuguese.

This is an interesting tactic. Why would a bot spam in Portuguese? My guess is that a really high percentage of blogs are written in English (second Chinese, Japanese, various Indian dialects). Portuguese is probably pretty low on the list.

The NYT has a piece on the Technorati Survey that says the common language alternates between Japanese and English. I really want a table that counts the number of blogs and websites by language though - I feel like someone has already crawled for this. My hunch is that Portuguese is incredibly low, what with only two speaking countries and all.

If anyone were to write bot spam, or especially troll spam, why wouldn't you translate it to a common language? The link is the key content - why carry bot ads for a website done in Portuguese? Chances are that just changing the language to English would drastically increase readership. Whether you agree with it or not, English is the language of business.

Naturally, if you are the one Rodrigo that I know in Brasil, please do not be offended and I will look at your site about t-shirts. You would think this is funny.