Bad Grammar Comment Points Back to (Hidden) Filipino?

March 16, 2007

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Today I was browsing through Alister Cameron’s blog (love his content) and was curious about his post on the Filipino link builder who can’t write.

I went over to that blog to check it out (something I will usually do if you leave me a comment), and something was immediately obvious to me: this is a caucasian male who clearly has a good command of the English language, and (from the Contact page) lives in Ontario, Canada. So it seemed immediately strange to me that his comment on my blog post was written in broken, second-rate English.

What you canâ€™t see from the front-end of my blog is what my admin page tells me: that the IP address of this commenter is 58.69.208.247. I do an RDNS lookup, a traceroute, a geo-ip lookup and all that jazz and come up with the confident fact that the commenter is in the Philippines! What the?!

What the?! indeed! This makes me reflect back to an old post as to why Filipinos would make good bloggers. And there was a lot of pride in my words when I did mention that we have a good command of English as it is a national language in this Asian country, apart from our local Filipino.

But what’s peculiar was the RDNS thing. I’m clueless and would rather leave this up to the experts who can explain why something like this can happen.

Writing

Comments

7 responses to “Bad Grammar Comment Points Back to (Hidden) Filipino?”

March 16, 2007

Alister Cameron

I’m with you Jayvee… there is no reason to assume a Filipino doesn’t have a great command of English! I should have been more clear about that, because I wasn’t meaning to insinuate anything.

Cheers,

– Alister
March 16, 2007

Jayvee

none taken 🙂 im just very curious as to how it traces back to someone else. iloilo is where the commenter is from, one of the major islands here.
March 16, 2007

Brent Hodgson

Using proxies to distribute comments over a variety of IP addresses, bad records/slow-to-update against the IP address, and some other techie things could have caused it.

But Google the IP – http://www.google.com/search?q=58.69.208.247

There are (some, but not many) other spam comments noted as coming from this IP.
I looked into the backlinks for one of these sites and found a whole heap more “Cool blog you have.” comments all over the place.

Looks like this Filipino was having a bad-english-day when he commented Alister’s blog.

Brent
March 16, 2007

Jim

Grammatically challenged… we can forgive this (but that’s really bad…) but assuming another identity?? now that’s one thing unacceptable.
March 16, 2007

Riz

Definitely an SEO strategy (and a bad one at that). I hate it when Filipinos get tagged as 3rd class SEOs.
March 20, 2007

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