Michael Gracie

CIO News Alerts noted Google’s Blogger service was hit by an outage.

Yea, Google’s blog was hacked, and someone posted a message that they had to remove. Now living in the world of free software, they say shit happens (and it happens a lot). So every now and then you need to patch stuff - I suspect that was what Google was doing, so it didn’t happen again.

But, to the outside world it is big news, an outage. Bloggers loose perspective:

Mark Nolan began using Blogger to host a personal blog about soccer about two months ago, and is disappointed with the platform’s reliability so far. “This isn’t what you’d expect from an operation like Google. It’s embarrassing in my opinion,” Nolan said in a phone interview.

If the availability problems persist on Blogger, Nolan will consider switching the blog to another platform.

Nolan, who lives in Manchester, United Kingdom, and posts under the pseudonym James Ryddel in the soccer blog, hosts other websites he publishes with British providers.

Although all hosting providers experience downtime, the Blogger situation is reaching unacceptable levels, said Nolan, who works as director of TXT Media. “Google should concentrate on improving Blogger’s reliability and not on adding new features,” Nolan said.

I say Google should start concentrating all right - on specifically charging Mr. Nolan hard currency for use of their service.

I’ve been wondering what happened to all the spam blogs over at Google’s Blogger service. Spam from Blogger sites just seemed to whither away.

Were splogs just the news item of the day, for which attention waned, or was Google really doing something about the problem? It now seems the latter was the case.

but how about the spam? I haven’t seen much in the way blog spam coming from Blogspot as of late. Chris Pirillo was screaming bloody murder about it a few months back, as were other high-profile types.

What happened to Google’s splogs? Did someone put the breaks on it, or is everyone still having a problem with it (and it just so happened to be the sensationalist news of the day)?
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According to Mark Cuban, Google has finally responded to their splog problem. They added word verification to new blogs and blog posts. This means no more automation.

I have two things to say about this: 1) Thanks Google, and 2) interesting how folks move, even big ones like Google, when some multi-billionaire is screaming bloody murder.

***UPDATE***

I may have screwed this one up, as I have been told Google has had the “captcha” in place for a while. If so, then how did the splog bot hit them?

As if this splogging issue couldn’t get any worse, you can now blame folks selling software like this in addition to blaming Google.

At least Google took the initiative to knock the purveyor’s Blogger sample page offline.

I came across this post from A Whole Lotta Nothing, which struck a familiar cord: Blogspot is hurting America. Well, I am not sure how much it is “hurting America”, but it certainly seems like it could be hurting bloggers.

Is the Blogger product really being used by spammers to game Google search results? Does Google know this is going on, and if so, are they doing anything about it? They are in the same building, aren’t they?

Seems like a simple solution could work as follows…
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