Your Blog Is Locked

I returned from my trip to San Jose this week to discover the fine folks (or bots) at Blogger had determined that my blog was a splog:

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Awesome. So how did it determine that my blog was a splog? Golly, it must be because it is linked to by, oh, about 6 external sites according to Technorati (clearly suspicious). Maybe it's because I have links to my Flickr, last.fm and other personal information so that no one could possibly find me and report me for my 'spam blogging' activities.

Added irony: when I spell checked this posting with Blogger's own spell checker, it suggested 'blocker' as the correct word for 'Blogger'. It also suggests 'degenerate' for 'Technorati' as well.

I don't suppose that I will ever actually get an explanation (or an apology). Time to consider looking for a new place to host this blog? Maybe.

technorati tags: blogger, blogging, spam, splogs, suckage