Growing pains in the blogosphere

My blog-reading has been severely impaired by the ongoing problems that Blogger seems to be having. Big-league bloggers including Don Sensing, Wretchard, and Gary Farber are finding it well nigh impossible to post. I’ve noticed peculiar problems on a lot of Blogger-based blogs including extreme slowness, problems with comments and just weird formatting. I wonder if these problems aren’t due to lost changes or partially-successful saves. Lots and lots of lost posts are being reported. I suspect that less determined bloggers who are still using Blogger have given up entirely waiting for the problems to subside.

Will they ever subside? If the insights of Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest hold true, maybe not. In his recent post, “The Blight at Blogger”, Vanderleun chalks the problems with Blogger up to an infestation of spamblogs there. I’ve never seen a definition of a spamblog but try this one out for size: a spamblog is an automated blog that exists solely to send spam (particularly comment or trackback spam) or to facilitate the sending of such spam. The little screen capture that Vanderleun shows suggests that there are quite a few Blogger spamblogs and that they’re sucking up an increasing amount of resources.

When I decided to start blogging I purposely avoided the regular blog hosts in favor of a commercial web host. I had the modest amount of money needed to support a blog on such a host and I liked the idea of the enhanced level of security and support that such a host affords. I also didn’t care for the idea of being dependent on software that I couldn’t fix for doing my blogging (I come from the “grep for it” days of Unix).

But I realize that lots of people don’t have the money, the skills, the patience, or the inclination to adopt such a solution.

Vanderleun ends his post with the following plaint:

“As I mentioned the other day, and as Google (via Google News and now Blogger) seems too dumb and in love with its own aroma to learn, computers can only take you so far. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to hire some grown-ups if only to have them make you clean up your room.”

I rather suspect that Google rather prides themselves on the absence of grown-ups—it’s probably part of their business model—so I doubt much relief will come from that direction.

I suspect a better strategy for many might be to jump ship and go over to MSN Spaces or AOL Journal or something similar. The principle being something like the idea that the best place to park is next to a car much more expensive than yours: you know they’ll be careful because they have so much more at stake. In Microsoft’s case they’re being ridden pretty hard about security right now so I doubt they’ll let security problems overcome their blogging experiment.

Meanwhile welcome to the Wild West! The gamblers and grifters have moved into the tent communities that the mountain men, trappers, and prospectors here in the blogosphere have set up and you’d better watch your hat and coat (not to mention claim jumpers: the Daily Kos—arguably the most popular and influential of all blogs—got hijacked briefly earlier this week).