No More Chinese MP3s!
A while back I made a webpage dedicated to the Chinese song “The Moon Represents My Heart.” I also put online ten different renditions of this song in MP3 format. I thought it was pretty cool to be able to compare them. Aware that the Chinese words on the page would soon have Baidu’s searchbot on my case, I did my best to keep it off my site with my robots.txt file. Looks like that was completely futile.
Teresa Teng’s version of the song was the first to be hammered. I had to replace it with a link to MP3.baidu.com‘s search results to preserve my own bandwidth. Soon, the bandwidth consumed by the other MP3s on that page started creeping up as well. I had to remove Andy Lau’s rendition. Then Lesley Cheung’s. I forgot about it for a while, but if I hadn’t checked my stats in the middle of April I would have exceeded my bandwidth allotment solely because of those MP3 files, as bandwidth consumption had taken another big jump. I removed all the MP3s. I had no other choice.
Lesson learned: do not put up Chinese songs for download. Your bandwidth is no match for China’s web surfing population! (Well, don’t put up popular songs, anyway. Rapping flight attendants might be OK.)
In other news, I recently participated in an anonymous blogging survey for someone’s thesis. I was e-mailed because I was in the Technorati Top 2000. Wow! That kind of surprised me. Top 2000 out of 9,500,068 blogs. Top 2% isn’t too shabby for a niche blog prone to periodic entries as boring as this one.
In case you’re wondering (as I did) where this “Technorati Top 2000” list can be found, it can’t. There’s only a Technorati Top 100 online. The student contacted Technorati with details of the study, and Technorati complied.
or you could send the files to me and I will mirror them for you, just like the Chinese fonts.
You can get your technorati rank if you have an account of http://www.technorati.com. Once you have an account, go to this page:
http://www.technorati.com/members/claims.html
Tian,
Thanks, but I think I’ll let this one go.
Henry,
I do have a Technorati account, but didn’t realize it gave my rank. It says I’m #8,691. That makes more sense, but then it doesn’t explain why I got e-mailed to participate in the survey. Hmmmm.
The Technorati 100 listing is pretty interesting. It seems like half the top 10 are rightwing bloggers! I wonder what kind of money the top 100 people can make having ads on their blogs? Anyone have any ideas?
A HAIKU of thanks
for “rapping flight attendant.”
“Needfully” obscene.
{smile} BOKE
So, due to technical difficulties, the MP3s are off line and out of reach. It’s a shame, because I logged on last week and read about The Moon That Represents My Heart and I made it my personal mission to learn the song and belt out my own throaty rendition.
I think a similar thing just happened to me this past week. I was hosting a 2.5mb MP3 for my friends’ band the Subcity Dwellers (myspace.com/subcitydwellers), and within 5 days had over 10GB of traffic for this song alone! I’m only allowed 10GB/month, so my webhoster is charging me extra!
I looked into recent referrals to my webspace, and 78% had no referrals, when a few other funny IP#’s showed up, along with a few baidu.com referrals. Not knowing what baidu was at the time I did some google searching and found your blog among other sites.
another blog/site had loose instructions on how to search for mp3’s using Baidu, and it indicated that after a search, you’re suppose to right-click and “save link as” to download an mp3, which might explain why “(no referrals)” was showing up.
There’s not much internet content on this massive bandwidth consumption occurrence, and your experience is the only thing that can help me explain what recently happened to my bandwidth. (thanks!)