Betsy Newmark is back and blogging up a storm.

She notes other blogs affected by Blogger’s incompetence (Viking Pundit, Fausta, and Stolen Thunder) and adds:

I got a message from Blogger saying that they had recovered my blog and that somehow I had gotten caught up in some massive “automated spam prevention system” action that had thought that my blog was spam. Huh?! Then, the kicker was that they weren’t yet ready to give me back my URL but would try to negotiate with the blogjacker who had put up a false Betsy Page using my URL. Huh?! The guy had just appropriated my URL yesterday and they had to ask him pretty please to give it back? Fortunately, after about five hours, they decided that, since all the content and comments had been deleted on the fake Betsy page, that they would kindly restore my URL to me. Thank you.

Google, I think we have a problem. If you’re going to start deleting blogs and then take four days to figure out and correct what happened, you’re going to lose more and more people.

DJ Drummond at Stolen Thunder has more:

My friends Betsy Newmark and Eric Lindholm have finally been able to start blogging again, although damage was done to their sites, possibly permanent. I was much luckier, getting my blog back Thursday night and pretty much intact. At this writing Blogger/Google has yet to release any explanation for what happened, much less any sort of apology or proper confirmation of expectations. As a number of readers have observed, you get what you pay for, but as I observed in an open letter to Google, such tactics satisfy the lawyers, but never the customer. The clear message sent by Google, intended or not, was that they would like serious bloggers to leave Blogger for more reliable and trustrworthy hosts, and leave Blogspot domains to fools and knaves. The message is compelling, in that measure.

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