One of the reasons I changed my blog from Blogspot to a paid site (besides going for a customized layout) was so I could avoid the service denials that have been plaguing that company. As it turns out, those service denials have very serious repercussions: one of Blogspot’s most famous users, Betsy Newmark, has lost complete access to her blog.

Here’s the text of the e-mail she sent to the Instapundit:

Dear Glenn,

I’m writing you because you seem to have a finger on the pulse of the blogger world and maybe know some way to help me or at least to get the word out so that maybe Blogger will help me.

My blog disappeared from Blogger some time Tuesday. All I get is a message that my blog wasn’t found on their server. When I go to my Edit page, it doesn’t show Betsy’s Page as one of my blogs anymore. It’s as if my identity was erased.

I just get this very irritating message
“The blog you were looking for was not found.” It doesn’t show up on my dashboard at all.

Now, somebody has started a blog using my address and hijacked it. This is not me, but it is my URL. How despicable is that?

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/

I have been writing Blogger for the past two days and all I get are the irritating auto-generated messages. What does it take to get a personal contact from those guys?

They put up those deceptive notes on their Status Page saying that they are doing maintenance on the server and now everything is fixed. http://status.blogger.com/

IT IS NOT FIXED. They are either deceived or are deceiving people. Viking Pundit and DJ Drummond of Stolen Thunder and Polipundit have experienced the same thing, though DJ was somehow able to get his back.

It wouldn’t be so bad if an actual human being wrote me and told me what was going on and that they were working on it and when I could expect it to be fixed and what I could do if it is not fixed at that point. But they don’t do that. And so people will get angry and leave Blogger and go to some other format for their blogs. And their customer service will be the reason.

I was wondering if you could put up a post telling people of my story and see if anyone has any recommendations of how to get my blog back. I hope to be back as soon as possible at either my old address or at a new address. But I would like to get to the bottom of this saga of my blog.

I’m inclined to think that this is a service glitch, since I haven’t been able to view her page, but I find the note of hijacking extremely disturbing. Understand that Betsy is one of the better right-wing blogs out there, nowhere near as strident as, say, Michelle Malkin’s. (To get an idea of what she’s like, have a look at this Washington Post article on her.)

If anyone knows what exactly is going on with Blogspot, I’m sure that Betsy — and Professor Reynolds — would be eager to hear from them.

UPDATE (17 March): It looks like one of Betsy’s readers — a blogger named Duane — has managed to resurrect some of Betsy’s blog from a Google cache and put it up at this link here. It’s a temporary solution to what’s developed into a nightmare P.R. situation for Blogspot.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 09:43 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.