A much more famous blogger found her Blogspot deleted

I didn’t know the politics of Prof Ann Althouse before tonight, but I see her blog, which is far more widely read than mine—with readership into the eight figures—also got pulled by Google-owned Blogger recently. Her experiences mirrored mine, except she had some of her readers join in the forum, which, admittedly, didn’t help things too much. Still, there was plenty of snark, interestingly, from the same forum bloke that I encountered. It was back within days, so it was easier than the six-month fight I had to get Vincent Wright’s Social Media Consortium restored.
   You can have a read of her experience here, while conservative blogger Patterico has some interesting comments when he reported the matter. Readers there, and those who commented on my case, have similar thoughts.
   Prof Althouse had it easy. And even though I dealt with Google over six months, the company took nine months to sort out this lawyer’s blog. Wonder whatever became of this lady’s blog, detailed in this thread.
   Of course, telephone-number readers are nothing like a single Reuter blog post.
   Moral of the story: avoid Blogger like the plague, unless you personally know Felix Salmon at Reuter. (And here is the opposite argument, out of fairness. The comments, for and against, must be considered for anyone wishing to start a blog.)


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3 thoughts on “A much more famous blogger found her Blogspot deleted

  1. Hmmm.

    I read all of the links, as far as I could. About all I could conclude is some people can really excel at coming off like a jerk on the Internet. I’m mostly talking about the comments (the ones at TechDirt in particular), but I did laugh at someone referencing Wheaton’s law.

    (Wheaton being Wil Wheaton, I’m sure, i.e. “Don’t be a dick!”)

    This like so many other things… always an exception out there, always someone who says things are quite peachy no matter hard evidence to the contrary– although, the world is big and complex enough place I do understand both can exist.

    You know I’m partial to WordPress and I have almost zilch experience with Blogger. Following other people’s blogs, yes, doing my own there, no. With the VOX shutdown, I just quickly summed up my options and WordPress seemed best.

    Not all of my contacts agreed, so I set up an RSS feed, client-side, of course. I’d love for something unified again so I hear from people more often, but… *sigh* yada yada I miss VOX, even when it was going into the crapper, etc.

  2. You’ve summed it up pretty well, Jak. My intent was to show that for all the pros and cons of Blogger, it really falls down on customer service. Comments are always good places to find some odd people on our planet. I don’t think the world’s going to hell in a hand basket, but I do think the internet reveals more clearly just how stupid some folks are—and how much work the education sector has got in front of it.
       Vox was a great platform. Shame it stopped working for me long before it died. I still have dead links all over the place because of the shutdown, particularly on this blog, where I occasionally reposted things.

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