OK, so I’ve been getting referrals from The Social Media Library, which describes itself as follows:
Social Media Library contains the first ever regionally-focused directory of influential blogs read in the UK. Social Media Library’s proprietary BlogScore™ ranks each blog in terms of its influence and its visibility in search engines – providing you with all the necessary information to determine which bloggers to engage with online. Full contact details for each blog are also provided.
Tens of millions of blogs exist online, with only a relatively small percentage holding any influence. Social Media Library allows you to cut through the noise and quickly find the online influencers that carry most sway. Social Media Library’s research team uses a proprietary ‘social media spider’ to scan the Web for the most influential blogs, across all major topics of interest. Each blog is manually checked before being added to the directory. Only the most influential and well-read blogs are included.
BlogScore! Not only is it a trademark, it’s InterCapped as well – must be good. And then I started seeing referrers from CisionPoint, which seems to be some sort of cloud-based PR application. A DMS – Drivel-Management System – perhaps. Here’s their blurb:
CisionPoint brings together – in one integrated customised dashboard – the on-demand tools you need to create, execute and evaluate superior campaigns from start to finish, building on the world’s largest media databases, Mediadisk and PR Planner.
Log in to plan your campaign, connect with the media directly, monitor news coverage and analyze campaign results
More here. I can just see Saif Gaddafi peering at his troll-penetration Gantts. Looking at the full URI: http://cisionpoint.com/Login.aspx?sessiontimedout=true&ReturnUrl=%2fNewsItemDetail.aspx%3fid%3d1678111250%26RowId%3d1678111250%26WorkspaceId%3d194354550
I would think that whoever’s using it is trying to monitor either who’s commented on some news item, or else who’s commented on a blog post that’s been scraped into their database. We seem to have a unique identifier for the news item – which is also used in a database somewhere as a row primary key – and another for the project or user (the WorkspaceId field). A quick check shows that this particular system is being used by InterPublic Group in New York City. Cision is UK based and I presume the data centre is too, but the browser referral puts it on an AS174(Cogent) block whose referral whois identifies it as a /29 route assigned to them.