What we needed was our own Felix Salmon
Fascinating, isn’t it? If you happen to have a Blogger blog that was wrongly deleted, and one of your readers is Felix Salmon of Reuter, then of course Google is going to come to your rescue within a day. (The link, and an important detail below, was found by Josh Forde and Tweeted to me earlier today.)
There’s good criticism from Mr Salmon here on Google’s policy as well as other examples of the company’s broken promises in the comments.
Rick Klau, one of the Blogger managers, put his address in the comments asking one disgruntled blogger to contact him, and to get his site restored.
I’ve now written to Mr Klau, too, about Vincent Wright’s Social Media Consortium and the “service” Google has provided us to date. We shall see if he, and his company, are being sincere.
If I get no satisfaction, then we might conclude that there’s one rule for those who manage to get the profile of a Reuter editor (Felix, we miss Portfolio), and another rule for everyone else.
PS.: On the afternoon of January 6 NZDT, Rick Klau reinstated and whitelisted Vincent’s blog. Thank you, Rick—so glad we finally got the definitive word from Google!
I’ve replied to your e-mail, Jack. While I appreciate your frustration, I tried to explain the characteristics of the blog that made it particularly difficult for our reviewers to feel comfortable reinstating. Nevertheless, I have reinstated your blog.
Hi Rick: I was about to write an extra post to say that you had kindly responded. It was great to get the official word from someone inside Google for the first time.
Just for full disclosure, Rick noted that the Social Media Consortium had [some characteristics of a splog in its design. He suggested that we should not reveal which, so Google can continue fighting those sites that are really splogs.]
Sadly, the sensors promptly picked up the reinstated blog before Vincent had a chance to change those links.
But it does look like we don’t need our own Felix Salmon in this case.