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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Splogging: Free and Easy, from Google
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Gordon Weakliem notes that blogger (owned by Google) makes it easy for sploggers to pick up formerly legitimate sites:
I just noticed that Jeff Katz' blog, which used to be at gmorning.blogspot.com, has been taken over by a splog, in what appears to be a case of blog squatting. Jeff's last post was a bit over a month ago. No inkling of what happened, except that apparently Blogger allows weblog names to be recycled with no embargo period. You'd have to be insane to use blogspot as a blogging platform if this is the case. It's OK for recycling to happen, but they should place some sort of embargo when a weblog author relinquishes a blog - say a month where the feed will 410. Most aggregators will automatically unsubscribe you upon receipt of a 410. But, really, this is amazing - this morning the former CEO of Orbitz morphed into a spammer. Blogger is turning itself into a pariah.
For a company that claims to be fighting spam, Google certainly isn't doing some of the really simple stuff. This blog in question is sporting an immediate redirect out, to the splog. Like Gordon says, you have to be nuts to locate your blog on that service.