Stanford to the Rescue

Realizing that this blog wasn't the only "false positive" in Google's spam detection system, I thought I might freelance an article on the problem. I called Google's press line which was answered by... a robot! The automated voice recognition system promised to transcribe the message and decide if I was a real journalist. Never got a response. Google must have not even bothered to google me! (In case you didn't know, Google owns blogger.com and allows people to make money on their blogs with google ad sense.) I asked a friend who is a web techno-journalist to contact one of his sources at Google. The person's response might as well have come from a robot: "We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. We're aware that false-positive matches sometimes happen, and when they do, we have a process in place so that we can quickly review a blog that has been marked as spam. If we determine that the blog is not spam, we work to quickly restore the blog. We're always innovating to improve our products and services and are working on making this process even better in the future." Finally, through the Stanford Alumni Association inCircle web site, I contacted a recent grad who was listed as working in customer support at Google. This guy is my hero. He answered my email and... got my blog restored. I now have a backup hard copy of all the posts and a backup blog... just in case the 'bots decide to eat my blog again. BTW, my Stanford source says there was no trace of any of the appeal forms that I filled out.