Before I get back to the business of talent coaching, a few words of wisdom for anyone blogging their heart out on blogger.com: It is still the easiest free site I have found for beginning bloggers, but you have to read their terms of service agreement carefully and realize that even if you don't violate it, you can still be blocked with no easy way to appeal.
1. If you are asked to type in word verification when posting, appeal immediately. It's possibly the first and only sign your blog has been flagged as spam and eventually will disappear. Google did not send me an email or anything else.
2. Realize that your blog can disappear at any time. Save a backup copy of all your posts.
3. Once my blog was gone, I found the appeal forms to be a complete waste of time.
4. The blogger discussion "help" groups were an even bigger waste of time. They tell you to wait four business days and then get on a "spreadsheet." Yeah, right.
5. One site was kind of helpful. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/
6. I'm sure the people who work at Google are nice folks who mean well. But good luck getting in touch with one of them. The 'bots don't like being overruled.
7. I'm in favor of banning spam. I don't need any Viagra, thanks. But a huge company like Google must have the resources to respond to appeals on false postitives. It would have taken a real person two seconds to verify that my blog was not spam.
Which brings me to my final point. I hear that Google now wants to be the keeper of the nation's health records. Great! What if the 'bots decide I'm deceased, or mix me up with the OTHER Terry Anzur who has some horrible disease? Welcome to the brave new world where content only exists to generate revenue for corporations who could care less about the real people on the other side of the computer screen. Be very afraid.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Stanford to the Rescue
Realizing that this blog wasn't the only "false positive" in Google's spam detection system, I thought I might freelance an article on the problem. I called Google's press line which was answered by... a robot! The automated voice recognition system promised to transcribe the message and decide if I was a real journalist. Never got a response. Google must have not even bothered to google me! (In case you didn't know, Google owns blogger.com and allows people to make money on their blogs with google ad sense.)
I asked a friend who is a web techno-journalist to contact one of his sources at Google. The person's response might as well have come from a robot:
"We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. We're aware that false-positive matches sometimes happen, and when they do, we have a process in place so that we can quickly review a blog that has been marked as spam. If we determine that the blog is not spam, we work to quickly restore the blog. We're always innovating to improve our products and services and are working on making this process even better in the future."
Finally, through the Stanford Alumni Association inCircle web site, I contacted a recent grad who was listed as working in customer support at Google. This guy is my hero. He answered my email and... got my blog restored. I now have a backup hard copy of all the posts and a backup blog... just in case the 'bots decide to eat my blog again. BTW, my Stanford source says there was no trace of any of the appeal forms that I filled out.
I asked a friend who is a web techno-journalist to contact one of his sources at Google. The person's response might as well have come from a robot:
"We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. We're aware that false-positive matches sometimes happen, and when they do, we have a process in place so that we can quickly review a blog that has been marked as spam. If we determine that the blog is not spam, we work to quickly restore the blog. We're always innovating to improve our products and services and are working on making this process even better in the future."
Finally, through the Stanford Alumni Association inCircle web site, I contacted a recent grad who was listed as working in customer support at Google. This guy is my hero. He answered my email and... got my blog restored. I now have a backup hard copy of all the posts and a backup blog... just in case the 'bots decide to eat my blog again. BTW, my Stanford source says there was no trace of any of the appeal forms that I filled out.
Battling the 'Bots
I should have realized there was a problem when Blogger started asking me to type in one of those scrambled sets of letters each time I posted. I figured it was just normal security because I was posting from overseas in Southeast Asia. Little did I know it was the first indication that Google's robots had decided my blog was SPAM.
After speaking at RTNDA in mid-April, I took a few weeks off from blogging so I could take care of other clients and negotiate the contract for a return visit to Maldives. When I signed on in mid-May, I discovered that the Terry Anzur Coaching Blog had been removed from blogger.com. The Bots had spoken and I was spam. The only option given was to click on a form to ask for an appeal.
Nothing happened with the form I sent in on May 18, so I started clicking around the "Help" site, which was no help at all. It only linked me to other blocked bloggers who had been banned by the bots. Some of the stories were heartbreaking. One person was blogging for a terminally ill child. A lawyer was threatening to sue to get his blog back. One guy was so frustrated that he drove to Google's headquarters in Mountain View CA and taped a letter to the front door.
I joined a discussion group and found one or two "blogger employees" who allowed you to list their blog on their "spreadsheet." Still, no way to talk to a real person about getting my blog back. I filed another appeal on May 26. Nothing.
It was as if someone had died. Gone were my dreams of a book or even a movie: Team Terry and the Teenagers of TV Maldives take on the old system and win one for freedom and democracy in the Muslim world, led by a news director, CEO and Minister who put their jobs on the line. I still had my photos, but now the story would have to be reconstructed from memory. The 175 posts and photos on my now-extinct blog were GONE. Worse, potential clients had been reading the blog as proof of performance. I'll never know how many clients went away while the blog was down. Read on to find out how this month-long ordeal finally ended... and the wisdom I can now pass along to other bloggers battling the 'bots.
After speaking at RTNDA in mid-April, I took a few weeks off from blogging so I could take care of other clients and negotiate the contract for a return visit to Maldives. When I signed on in mid-May, I discovered that the Terry Anzur Coaching Blog had been removed from blogger.com. The Bots had spoken and I was spam. The only option given was to click on a form to ask for an appeal.
Nothing happened with the form I sent in on May 18, so I started clicking around the "Help" site, which was no help at all. It only linked me to other blocked bloggers who had been banned by the bots. Some of the stories were heartbreaking. One person was blogging for a terminally ill child. A lawyer was threatening to sue to get his blog back. One guy was so frustrated that he drove to Google's headquarters in Mountain View CA and taped a letter to the front door.
I joined a discussion group and found one or two "blogger employees" who allowed you to list their blog on their "spreadsheet." Still, no way to talk to a real person about getting my blog back. I filed another appeal on May 26. Nothing.
It was as if someone had died. Gone were my dreams of a book or even a movie: Team Terry and the Teenagers of TV Maldives take on the old system and win one for freedom and democracy in the Muslim world, led by a news director, CEO and Minister who put their jobs on the line. I still had my photos, but now the story would have to be reconstructed from memory. The 175 posts and photos on my now-extinct blog were GONE. Worse, potential clients had been reading the blog as proof of performance. I'll never know how many clients went away while the blog was down. Read on to find out how this month-long ordeal finally ended... and the wisdom I can now pass along to other bloggers battling the 'bots.
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