Thursday, January 8, 2009

Open letter to Google about Blogger problems

Dear Google,

A post to this blog on Jan. 2 called "Best of 2008" has disappeared. I am a music journalist and this post was an extensive list of my favorite releases of 2008, with images and YouTube clips. I spent a ridiculous amount of time working on it. It received comments from readers. The post does not appear in the cache for the blog, nor does it turn up when I search for phrases that I remember being in there. Other posts from around the same time, however, are still up.

I have looked through Blogger Help but haven't found any answer to my problem, nor have I found any way to contact someone at Google/Blogger who could help me. "Contacting support" does not actually have a way to contact support, but instead leads a user to your help forums, which tell me: "You cannot post messages because only members can post, and you are not currently a member." Besides the fact that I believe I am a member -- I have a Google account and also have this blog -- I don't think that thousands of miscellaneous posts from other people having problems exactly constitutes technical support.

This is especially frustrating since another post on a similar topic vanished from my blog months ago. In late June or early July I published a list called "Six-month report," which gave my favorite music of the first half of 2008. That disappeared somewhat quickly; a few weeks, I think.

Could you please help me in retrieving these posts? And if there are particular bugs in your programming that allow posts to disappear like this, could you please fix them?

Thank you,
Ben Sisario

1 comment:

tresider said...

I think the key here is that the two posts removed from your blog were lists of current music. I'm guessing Google has some overly active filter that looks for "pirating" sites and removes the posts. Thank you, RIAA.