TRENT LAPINSKI, a 20-year-old blogger and journalism student, has been investigating the social-networking site MySpace since July 2005, when the News Corporation bought it.

This week, Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog, published Mr. Lapinski's long, critical examination of MySpace. According to Mr. Lapinski and Nick Douglas, Valleywag's editor, an unidentified ''online publisher'' that had contracted Mr. Lapinski to write the article balked based on ''groundless legal implications'' after News Corporation complained (valleywag.com). Mr. Lapinski said the News Corporation declined to comment on his article.

But News Corporation is not the focus. It is the tale of MySpace's founders, who, according to Mr. Lapinski's report, came from companies involved with spam, spyware and adware.

The article was ''professionally fact-checked,'' Mr. Lapinski wrote, and although Mr. Douglas wrote in the introduction that it reads ''like a conspiracy theory,'' it is based mostly on information that has been in the public record all along, though never assembled in such a comprehensive fashion.

According to the article, and many sources to which it links, MySpace began this way: ''Headed by C.E.O., founder, and chairman Brad Greenspan, eUniverse (now Intermix Media), was a multimillion-dollar marketing and entertainment company known for sites like Skilljam.com, pop-up advertising, unsolicited mass e-mails, spyware, and the adware behind controversial peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa.''

Two men from a company called ResponseBase -- which, like eUniverse, was the target of many complaints about spamming -- came to eUniverse when that company purchased ResponseBase in 2002. They were Chris DeWolfe, the current chief executive of MySpace, and Tom Anderson, the first ''friend'' of MySpace members.The three men were members of Friendster, the social-networking site that preceded MySpace, and they used that site as a template for MySpace, but with the focus on commerce rather than networking, Mr. Lapinski said.

Mr. Lapinski said MySpace's initial popularity came not from word-of-mouth, as is often assumed, but from an intense e-mail campaign. From there, Mr. Lapinski details the already well-known, drama-fraught deal to sell Intermix to News Corporation last year. He describes the current MySpace as more of a marketing tool than a social-networking site.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal wrote that nearly everything in the article is old: It is ''well known in the marketing world that the parent company which sold MySpace to News Corporation was not a band of do-gooders.''

''Does this mean that MySpace will spam you now?'' Mr. Baker asked. ''Not really, as Fox Interactive is not going to ruin a good thing.''

JUST ANOTHER WORD -- The Cato Institute this week published its annual Economic Freedom of the World report, which ''seeks to measure the consistency of the institutions and policies of various countries with voluntary exchange and the other dimensions of economic freedom.''

''This year's report,'' according to the introduction, ''notes that economic freedom remains on the rise,'' though the average score is still only at 5.1 out of 10. The highest-scoring country is Hong Kong, with a score of 8.7, followed closely by Singapore (showing that economic freedom is measured here in strict isolation from other kinds of freedom). The United States scored 8.2. At the bottom are countries like the Central African Republic, Algeria and Venezuela. The report can be downloaded from cato.org .

NOSTALGIA BREAK -- Nostalgic types and ironic hipsters will love the set of 1970's toy commercials on YouTube (search for ''70's toy commercials''). The spots for games like Bing Bang Boing and for toys like the Water Wiggle are fun to watch, but the most striking thing about these commercials is how long they were. At a full minute each, they might lose most of today's attention-short youth (youtube.com) DAN MITCHELL

Drawing (Drawing by Alex Eben Meyer)