[Update: Blog is open again] Google Shuts Down Popular Blogger John Hempton After Publishing Controv

The Business Insider ^ | 1/3/10 | Joe Weisenthal

[FromLori]

Update: Hempton's blog is now back.

Original post: On January 2nd, financial blogger extaordinaire John Hempton published a long post with the inflammatory title: "A dark privatised social security story: Astarra, the missing money and how examining a fund manager owned by Joe Biden’s family led to substantial regulatory action in Australia."

I can read it right now in my Google reader, but if you want check it out, you're out of luck.

Suddenly Hempton's blog -- which uses Google's blog platform Blogger -- is labeled as spam and unavailable.

The discovery was made by Felix Salmon, who suspects that someone wants to silence Hempton, and is using Google's report spam feature to silence Hempton's blog.

Whatever the reason is, it's embarrassing that a blog like Hempton's can so easily get snagged, particularly considering the quality of its content and the multitude of inbound links from high profile sites, as Salmon notes.

Hopefully this will be corrected soon, but for an average person, it's not always easy to rectify Google's mistakes.

This is another risk of using Google's cloud -- something we recently discovered when our email was hacked -- and if you're a blogger who publishes content that may make people angry, it's probably worth getting your own domain and hosting setup.

[max americana]

“We at Clusty don’t track you. Our toolbar doesn’t track you. We don’t want to know your email address.

Just search, all the time. No questions asked.”

hmm, sounds promising..

[FrankR]

Oops...should be “.org”...sorry about that. Here’s the link I use:

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

[max americana]

I DID use Anonymouse years ago but if you want use it and log to one your accounts, say yahoo, it kicks you out and if you ever do log in, your comments are accepted by the site your are commenting on. Something about the cookies..

[mojitojoe]

Google sucks! PERIOD

[Soothesayer9]

Only if you don’t use it.

Seriously, if you dont like Google, then don’t use them! Try ALtaVista or some other lame search engine and see what that gets you.

[Screaming_Gerbil]

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

Thank you for the proper link.

Love their apparent non-PC attitude with their pages. Ha ha ha...

[Terpfen]

I don't understand why anyone who thinks they have anything important to say, and that would be just about everyone writing on the 'net, would use google, you tube, ebay or any other leftist element of the internet.

Because taking your toys and going home is no way to distribute information.

[RobinOfKingston]

Well, there ya go ... replying to something I didn’t write.

Thanks, anyway.

[mojitojoe]

I don’t use it and have no intention of using it unless I go through another server. Google is noting but a bunch of spies and You Tube = Google. I wouldn’t put anything on YT and I always use a proxy. They want to track and spy, make it hard on them.

[mojitojoe]

Bing, Ixquick, Scoogle, Dogpile, answers,com, creative commons, dogpile, there are plenty of others if one doesn’t want to use a proxy with Google. I couldn’t care less. If you like being tracked and spied on, have at it.

[rmlew]

Google is evil. Never use Gmail, GoogleApps, or Blogger. You content is not yours with them.

[chuck_the_tv_out]

DON'T FEED THE INTERNET MSM.

They will be a bigger thorn in our side in 20 years than the regular MSM has been.

There are alternatives to blogger & google. Typepad seems to be better than blogger, & famlis.com is a lot better than google

[Terpfen]

I’m pretty sure that the part I quoted is indeed in the post you wrote. That’s why it’s quoted.

[RobinOfKingston]

Your reply had nothing to do with my original post. I wrote exactly nothing about “taking your toys home.” My point was, people b!tch about “google” and keep using it.

My toys are very much out on the playground. I rent my own web space, though, rather than give my business to someone I don’t trust ... like “google.”

[Terpfen]

I wrote exactly nothing about “taking your toys home.”

Ah, but you did. The point of your post is to complain that people participate in "leftist element[s]" (your phrase) of the Internet. Unfortunately, it does no good for our side if people bow out of the culture wars.

Conservatism is routinely ridiculed in the pop culture, and yes, that has an effect at the ballot box. To take that a step further and complain that people use sites like YouTube and eBay is to bury your head deeper in the sand.

[RobinOfKingston]

Ah, but you did.

Ah, but I didn't. The original post was about the shaky nature of content placed on what you call "pop culture" sites. My point was, don't place your valuables with people you do not trust.

Got any other new phrases to introduce?

And, for what it worth, I quickly depart most threads where I run into a poster with the attitude that it's not worth continuing the struggle 'coz the other guys already won. No. Nothing you have written to me puts you in that category. My head is sufficiently above the sand, however, that I ain't gonna waste my time with that doom and gloom crap. When the last .40 cal has been expended, politically speaking, that's when the battle is over. Everyones toys may be broken by that time.