Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
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 relenquishes 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. It seems to me that these problems could be fixed, but there's no willingness to do that. It may take blacklisting the blogspot.com domain from the major aggregators - I'm not saying that will happen, but in my opinion, it should have happened already.
blogsquatting. Why go to the trouble of purchasing domains, when Blogger is offering subdomains for free?