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Blogger Adds Flagging Option to New Blogs

Posted Aug 18th 2005 11:29AM by Brad Hill

Google's Blogspot has added a voting system so users can object to blogs. This feature, which is problematic in a few ways, might be in response to widespread criticism of Blogger's failure to address its glut of spam blogs. Using the flagging feature, users can object to any blogspot blog, even if it is merely, as Blogger Buzz suggests, "politically incorrect." Here are the problems:

  • The feature applies only to blogs created from now; all preexisting blogs are immune. See comment below; the flag appears on any blog that republishes with a new post.

  • The guidelines for objecting are too loose—nonexistent, really.

  • It's all too easy for a gang to attack any blog for any reason and log multiple "objectionable" complaints.

  • The feature does nothing to directly address spam blogs.

It seems to me the feature has the potential of doing more harm than good. At best, ineffective; at worst, damaging to the innocent.
[via Blog Herald]


Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. The button appears once blogs are republished. It does not just apply to newly created blogss:

"(Note: a blog has to be republished in order for this new button to show up in the navbar.)"

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by eddie

2. Yep, what eddie said: the Flag button appeared on my blogs after I posted or republished.

This does mean though that existing but abandoned or dormany spam blogs don't get the Flag button and keep on funnelling PageRank. It seems to me that Blogger could easily avoid this by force-republishing dormant blogs to add the Flag button.

As for how effective this is: that really depends on how actively Blogger respond to flagged blogs.

I would have liked the button to lead to a page where you can give reasons for flagging -- maybe a choice of hate/spam/spyware-install/other -- but maybe Google are going for the simplest possible option and hoping to identify contentious blogs by high flag numbers?

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by James Kew

3. This is a terrible idea and another example of how Google is trying to apply it's politics to it's products.

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by The Mad Tech

4. It seems with this and the suspected new penalties of the last few google updates (such as unnatural link growth), the previous sentiment of "there's nothing a competitor can do to harm your site" is out the window...

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Skin

5. I have deleted the navbar at the top. The advantage of being part of the blog community are outweighed by not knowing how many flags (out of the 30,000+ visitors a month to my site) it would take to be deleted and banned. Most people will remove the flag icon, including spammers, thus reducing the community effect of blogger. If the flag stays, this is the beginning of the end for blogger. Since google search results are already less on topic than yahoo, i'd say it's time to sell your stock. Oh, the insiders at google probably already have. This is just the dot com boom redux. Bye google, fun while it lasted...

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Angel

6. I decided to remove the navbar and host on my own server I was already hosting the images so the bandwidth is minimal for the blog text.

And that's that!

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Angel

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