Blogspot problems, again

Another Monkey was down for a period of time this morning. It's possible that this outage affected all Blogspot blogs - even after Another Monkey came back up I couldn't get on Mr. H.K.'s Postcards From Hell's Kitchen or Gort's Gort42, both of which are Blogspot blogs.

This is the first time I've encountered a problem in a while, but I've seen recent complaints from Gort and from John Webster of webster107. I know Gort is thinking of changing over to another blogging service, and Puppetdude already has. Last year Chris Pirillo trashed Blogspot for its infestation of fake blogs - actually, he went much further than that, declaring Blogspot "nothing but a crapfarm" (I'm still waiting for that apology, Pirillo - you insulted me and millions of others who actually write real content on our blogs) with 99% fake blogs (demonstrating either mathematical ineptness or a willingness to make up statistics on the spot to serve his own needs.) Pirillo and his minions even agreed to ghetto-ize Blogspot blogs, some going so far as to block comments from anyone listing a Blogspot address in their blog's URL. (Most blog comments have a feature that allows you to provide a link to your own site - but by this rule, I would not be allowed to post http://www.anothermonkey.blogspot.com/.) I suspect ulterior motives - after all, a free site like Blogger takes money away from pay-to-blog sites, and there's a lot of money to be made with pay-to-blog sites.

So, Chris Pirillo's objections and motivations aside, I think Blogger should take a look at the ongoing exodus of users and address the issues. Outages? Resolve them, and prevent them. Features offered by other blogging tools, like "categories"? Identify them, and incorporate them! Fake blogs? Police them. Many of the ones I've seen feature similar structures and even similar text - these should be easy to root out.

It still doesn't look like Another Monkey is 100% back - my sidebar is missing on my main page, although it is present on subpages, and this may already have been resolved. For all its problems, I like Blogspot, and I'm not about to give in to the blog-snobbery of Chris Pirillo and his ilk. But these problems do need to be addressed.