Red Maryland a spam blog?

Editor’s note – apparently there was an issue accessing this site since last night. I had to disable the Site Meter on a temporary basis to fix the problem; hopefully the folks there are working on it. Thanks to Joe Albero for the heads-up. (Wonder if that problem and the post subject are related?)

I became aware yesterday afternoon that the Red Maryland blog I contribute to was temporarily locked as a “spam” blog. As a part of Blogspot, this and thousands of other blogs fall under the auspices of Google, which can be a problem. Today was one of those days, as this quote from the Blogger Buzz blog attests:

While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake.

We’ve noticed that a few users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can’t post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.

We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks.

Many who picked up readership of monoblogue in recent months may not know that my blogging history includes a fairly short-lived Blogspot blog I called ttown’s right-wing conspiracy. But after looking into Google for a post I did there, I decided it would soon be time to get my own domain name and not be held hostage by the folks at Google.

The post I did actually turned out to be my first real splash in the blogging world, and as a guy who was lucky to get 10 readers a day at the time, that week I had nearly 200 and I found out a lot about blogging as a business. It was called “For a few dollars more…” and I posted it on July 28, 2005. I suppose I’ll see just how successful this link turns out to be because I still get the SiteMeter reports for that site and I still have a couple people a week who stumble onto my old place almost 3 years after I stopped posting there.

As I depicted in the 2005 post, Google employees were astoundingly liberal in their political giving and at the time were not very friendly to conservative sites like Red Maryland would eventually become. It’s not out of the realm of probability that someone on the left with an axe to grind may have reported a number of right-leaning sites as spammers in order to do a little Blogspot censoring and the folks at Google were only too happy to play along. As one of the e-mail commentors I received noted, “what if this happened right before the election?”

It’s the reason I decided to get my own site where I can pretty much say what I want, and even though I do pay for the server the cost is well worth the peace of mind. And while one drawback to that approach for Red Maryland would be having to recoordinate all the contributors to a new site (and making sure everyone repoints their browsers) perhaps another alternative would be to look into a WordPress blog (also a free service). But that has drawbacks too as my blogging friend Elbert can attest to.

In any case, hopefully the issue will be resolved soon if it hasn’t already been – but it’s a wake-up call to many on the right side of the blogosphere that free speech isn’t always free when someone else provides the platform. Perhaps we need to take a page from one of our heroes, Ronald Reagan, and actually pay for our microphone.

And now for something completely different…

On a number of occasions I’ve written about being a contributor to the Patriot Post internet newsletter and was asked to make a mention of times I’d actually submitted an article. Well, over the last three Fridays I’ve been fortunate enough to be included – two by their request and last week’s unsolicited.

Yesterday they placed my piece on the state of California banning transfats (page 9), last week’s item was on Beltway Gas Pains (page 5), and the earlier article discussed Big Labor’s effect on the Big Three (page 7). Of the three, the gasoline article was probably the most heavily edited (I think another contributor may have added his or her two cents in an article and portions of both were used) while the other two had a little light pruning and additions here and there. I could recognize them right away as mine though.

Sometime I may have to go through my e-mail and paper archives and see just how many times I’ve had something included over the years – my time with the Patriot Post dates back to my days in Ohio. There are times I wish there were bylines and such to recognize the writers but as I understand it a few may not benefit from having their names known. Thus we toil in obscurity but on the whole I’ve enjoyed the experience and hope to continue contributing many times in the future.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer. View all posts by Michael