Bizarre, but why?

[bodger]

I needed a real-time data feed to test the my SOAP API code, so I connected to LJ's real-time stream*. This worked really well, handing me chunks of XML describing whatever postings were occurring at the moment, and let me test my message processing software nicely.

However, I noticed something weird. More than a third of the postings were in random-looking journals, consisting of great piles of links to other random-looking journals, along with some throwaway text (example here).

This must produce a fair amount of load on the LJ servers, but I can't figure out why anyone would bother creating a bunch of random journals, and then massively post links between them. Strange DoS attack? Google link-stuffing? Spammer whitening?

Should I report this to LJ?

* http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml

Details on XML (and other) feeds here.