Blog-o-rama

Blogger blocked my blog! (hmm, that makes a nice tongue-twister). Blogger blocked my blog before I barely brought this boring blog back! baaaah!

Anyway, this is a strange story of a certain fuzzy algorithm at Blogger/Google. He ran into my blog and found it objectionable. All I did was during my last entry on Eugene Onegin, I linked to the same page on Met Opera's website three times. Since Google works on backlinks, it found it to be confusing, and decided that I might be Google-bombing. Plus, I had some Cyrillic (Russian) characters on the blog, making it that much more suspicious.

[ Click on images below to read the text ]

Here's the story:

I logged on to post a new blog entry. Here's Blogger greeting me with this message
"This blog has been blocked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots ..."

Say WHAT??






I then proceeded to the link Blogger provided to have my blog "unlocked". Here's the next page, greeting me with "Your blog is locked" - in bold!

It went on to read "Since you are an actual person, your blog is not a spam-blog".

Thank you very much for letting me know!

They asked me to wait until "one of their humans" verify my blog and unlock it! Here's the scary part: "If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks". Great! that scared the heck out of me! I sent them the form, with their assurance of getting back to me within a business day.


It was late evening, I was growing impatient. I can't afford to losing my 100+ posts, memories from the past two years, photos, etc in one shwoosh! I tried to send another "request" to Google to unblock my blog. Here's the zinger: their website now reads they will get back to me within TWO BUSINESS DAYS. Nice! Make me more impatient!


Hope at last! This afternoon, one of the humans from Google sent me this email, saying my blog has been "unlocked" and I can continue to post stuff on it.

Which brings up an interesting question. If an "inherently fuzzy" algorithm can zap a blog based on just ONE entry that it deems to be spam, how smart is it for us to keep using it? How about flagging a blog to warn a person and warning the person that their blog RESEMBLES blog-spam, instead of warning to rip the blog off of it's existence? What's the deal with deleting the blog within a "few weeks"? How many of us post to our blogs everyday? Most of us update our blogs once every two weeks, or even once a month! Imagine a guy posting stuff that Blogger's algorithm considers "blog spam" and he returns after a month to see nothing on his blog? Guess what happens then!! I mean, I understand the terms of service of these blogging servies, but wouldn't it be much more nicer to the user (who brings revenue to the company through Ads) if they could email him flagging his blog, and requesting to make amends? Makes sense to me! But what do I know? I'm just a human, with non-fuzzy logic!

May be it is time for Google/Blogger to reconsider their spam-blog detecting fuzzy algorithms and re-code them to be a bit more user friendly!