Thursday, June 01, 2006

Blogging frequency

Honestly y'all, I've been trying to be more frequent and original in my posts lately, while still linking to the really cool stuff I stumble across in my daily blog wanderings. But I admit that I'm lazy, and despite the critiques one could make about Blogger, and it's parent Google, I like the simplicity of how they are setup. You may have noticed that I've even joined the Google adsense program. Well for the last couple of days my posts through the Google tool bar have just disappeared. This is one of the big features I like about Google/Blogger is the integration of blogging with my surfing, normally it is a very organic experience. Well finally today after deciding that I wanted to post a picture with the "Rat" SUV link, and thus being forced to log into the actual Blogger page instead of posting through the tool bar, I discovered I now have to do one of those eye-test bot-fooling word verifications, before I publish or even save a draft of a post.

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

I guess I could take this a point of geek-pride, the blog-bots have officially come up to me and said "Gabba Gabba Hey! One of Us! One of US!"

I could get indignant that the whole reason, that I , a relatively tech-savy geek choose to plant my flag in what many other blogging-geeks refer to as the "blog-slums," is because my time is valuable. Even though I could spend the effort to register a domain, and hack together some html, and css, I'd rather spend that time surfing and sharing the cool stuff I discover. And I particularly like to share the good stuff that is the result of a lot of research, a lot of clicking through dead-links, winnowing out the BS, astroturfing, and other data detritus that's out there on the web. Anybody out there who is looking for information on scooters, gas or electric, (well excepting the honda/vespa zealot stuff) potentially has a lot of work ahead. I have seen a lot of "spam blogs" on scooters in particular. Perhaps there are so many, that "scooter" got me tagged as a spam blog?

Anyway, to the human Google employee who will be reading this, and thus judging my humanity (which is I suppose the truly depressing aspect of this situation, the fact that I failed somebody's low-rent Turing test), I hope you like what you see. And um.. maybe you could get the coders to add "post picture" functionality to the "blog-this" pop-up of the Google tool bar.

No comments: