Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Constructive Curmudgeon in Danger of Deletion

"When humans disappear, things get strange."--Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

It looks like this Google warning about being automatically labeled a "spam blog" is real. However, the link Google sent me does not go to what they say: a review form. Moreover, they say they get "false positives" (they sure did with me!) and will freeze pages that are not in fact spam blogs. Impersonal technology strikes again. There is a grace period and then will delete. Good night! Maybe Obama is after me.

Can anyone help? Humans are getting locked out by the computers.

6 comments:

pgepps said...

Dr. Groothuis, I'd be happy to help, if I'm able. You have my email address, if you'd like to take me up on it.

Two things I'd need are a link to the page you're getting information from, and any specifics Google may have provided (probably aren't any).

This actually first began happenning some time ago; it's an automated system that, so far as I can tell, is very inadequately designed. As you say--humans are getting squeezed out by the machines.

pgepps said...

looks like you do not need me. Blogger caught the error already:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/08/you-are-not-spam.html

Yossman said...

Also see:
http://www.macworld.com/article/
134830/2008/08/blogger.html

abcaneday said...

A year ago Google blocked one of my blogs after identifying it as a SPAM blog. I lost access to it for at least a couple of weeks. In the meantime, whenever I attempted to access my blog (http://crosstalking.blogspot.com/) the URL brought me to a dummy page that some guy named Gilbert in Montana had set up. Because of Google's error Gilbert hijacked my URL. So I lost me my URL, and Google would not retrieve it for me. Finally, when I was finally granted access again to my blog, because the URL had been changed permanently, the blog lost its readers.

My sympathies to anyone else to whom this has happened.

jcubsdad said...

I must be technologically totally naive. I thought that decision would be up to blogger, and that Google might de list you from their web search which is bad, but not the worst thing that can happen.

Oh how cyberspace is getting hard!

John said...

You may not have been far off the mark when you said, "Maybe Obama is after me."

See this article in the New York Sun:

"Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen..."