InfoWorld Warns People About Free Blogging Sites

Posted on May 16, 2006

InfoWorld has an article telling people to be wary of the free blogging tools. They go on to explain how a tech blog called Geeks Are Sexy became caught in Blogger.com's automated spam classifying system.

Okay enough fluff. That's the sales spiel that most of us hear and believe. But as loyal reader Kiltak discovered, it's not always that way. Kiltak is the proud owner of the excellently named Geeks Are Sexy blog. It's well written by guys who know what they're talking about and--most important--often link back to my blogs.
Predictably, they've become steadily more popular. More and more readers until one day, Kiltak tried logging onto his blog, only to discover that Blogspot seemed to have deleted his blog. No warning.
As expected, Kiltak sent a few salty emails and voice calls to the Blogspot folks, basically asking "What the @#$%?!?"
Sadly, it took them some time to figure out what he was talking about, but when they did the explanation went like this: The traffic going to Geeks Are Sexy as well as its content had risen to a level where Blogger decided it might be a possible source of 'spam' blogging. When that happens, it sticks the blog into a quarantine of sorts until they figure out what's what. Meanwhile the blogger no longer sees the site name in his blog management interface.

The Geeks are Sexy blog returned and complimented a nice support person from the Blogger service. In the comments of this post a few people asked why Geeks are Sexy won't leave Blogger and get their own domain. One of the Geeks are Sexy bloggers known as TheMatt explained why they are staying with Blogger:

Moving to our own domain was at least briefly considered. If Blogger had been unable to get the site back, there would've been no question that we would've abandoned this and moved to a different platform.
But moving now wouldn't be a simple business. The blog is back, and shouldn't be eaten by Blogger's spam killer in the future (so they say). This means that there'd be some pretty intense content migration to do (including images uploaded to the Blogger servers). Plus we'd lose our page-ranking, peoples' bookmarks would die, and all sorts of other uncoolness.

That does sound uncool. There is a debate about whether blogs need their own domain name. Those in favor of blogs owning their domain name argue that domain names and hosting are cheap and it is difficult to move to a unique domain name later once you have started a blog at Blogger, MySpace or MSN Spaces. However, free blogging services are attractive because they are obviously free and bloggers don't have to worry about any other technical issues like web hosting or domain name registration.