Slashdot Mirror
Is Google Neglecting Blogger?
Ian Lamont writes "For years, I've been frustrated by Blogger's relatively limited functionality and other problems. For instance, we've heard about Blogger's security flaws since the beginning of this decade. Blogger's latest problem, which lets bots bypass CAPTCHAs in order to set up spam blogs, is not just a sign of Google's disregard for security — it's symptomatic of Google's neglect of its Blogger service. For instance, Blogger is just now rolling out a feature that lets writers publish in the future, years after similar functionality was released in Wordpress and Moveable Type. Is Blogger destined to be a sideshow as long as Google keeps acquiring and building more high-profile services, such as Google Maps and YouTube?"
Give it another few years for Google to make it perfect, like everything they do
Then why are all the people still using it regardless?
It's not as if the other mentioned services (such as Wordpress) don't have free alternatives.
If you're serious about it all, you would buy your own domain, and use (and customize) any CMS to your liking.
I find it very funny to see these complaints (definitely "They've been neglecting it for years" ; Then why are you still blogging on there?
Not Invented Here Syndrome. YouTube is still a fairly new purchase, so it's hard to tell what'll happen there, but we've heard similar complaints about other things they've purchased like GrandCentral, Dodgeball, Jaiku, JotSpot, Urchin, etc.
On a related topic, the usenet groups I subscribe to are getting a ridiculous amount of spam recently from gmail accounts. On a given day, you'll get, say, 10 new posts, each with its own distinct subject line, trying to sell watches or running shoes. They're all from the same gmail account. It doesn't do you any good to plonk that gmail account, because the next day it's 10 new spams from some new gmail account. It's gotten to the point where I'm considering just filtering out all posts that come from gmail accounts. I'm guessing this is happening because google has relaxed their conditions for getting a gmail account, and at the same time the spammers are getting more sophisticated about solving captchas. The impression I get is that google is starting to feel the need to grow into their ridiculously large market capitalization, and they can only do that by bringing in lots of new users. If that means letting in lots of spambots too, well ...
Find free books.
Google has a long history in buying companies and letting the fruit rot on the vine. Look at Google Pages..... at first it seems like a great idea for Google.... free web hosting that's integrated with all of Google's services. Unfortunately, the only way to create pages is with Google's Page Creator, which sucks.
Everyone knows the drill by now, don't click the 40 year old virgin's link.
Its audience are the masses, and for those it's a very easy to use and convenient tool. If you need pro features, because your blog is so sophisticated, choose a pro service provider instead and stop whining! Sounds like targeted fud. Why else would one cite a six year old story about a "security flaw"?
just publish your stuff in 2010, when Blogger will hopefully be fixed.
Below is a general suggestion, but it is directly relevant to one of the main problems with Google's neglect of Blogger--several weeks ago (and several times in the past), the spammers have used Blogger as their reply channel for spam. Remember that the motivation of spamming is economic, and they need some way for their suckers to find them and send money. The suggestion below would be directly helpful in accelerating the response to this form of Blogger abuse--though it also applies to many other neglected systems that would more quickly receive the negative attention they deserve when they are abused by spammers.
Summary of Suggestion: How to make Gmail the spam target of absolute last resort.
The goal of this suggestion is to intelligently leverage and focus Google's expertise and credibility against the spammers and their accomplices. But where will the intelligence come from? From me, from you, from *ANYONE* who has a Gmail account and who wants to help oppose the annoying evil that is spam. Aggressively implemented, it could make Gmail into Spammer Heck--maybe to the point where only a fool would send spam to Gmail. (Yeah, there are plenty of fool spammers--but at least we'd get the laughs without the serious spammers.) Less spam = more value in Gmail.
So do you want to fight against spam? You, too, could become a WSF (wannabee spam fighter).
SpamSlam is my 'working draft' label. The idea is roughly based on other anti-spam systems--but with more smarts. Almost all email systems include one level of feedback in a Spam/NotSpam button. (For relative brevity and because it simplifies the draft implementation, I'm focusing on Web-based email here.) Think of SpamSlam as a report-spam-button on steroids. SpamSlam would report the spam, but also do much more. Essentially this Gmail feature would do some of the automatic analysis that any spam fighter has to do, get some intelligent feedback, and hopefully be able to act immediately against the spammer. Speed of action is actually crucial--cutting off the spammers' income is a key goal of this proposal.
Here is an approach to implementing it:
Clicking on SpamSlam would first trigger a low-cost automatic analysis of the email, including the headers. Let's call this Pass 0. Basically this is just using regular expressions to find things like email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers. The results would be used to generate a Pass 0 webform with comments and options (and explanations and links). This pass should also look for obfuscation and ask the wannabe spam fighter (WSF) to help break the spammers' attempts to evade the spam filters. (This is leveraging the spam's features against the spam--if a human can't figure out the spam, then the human can't send money to the spammer.) In many cases, this Pass 0 analysis may be able to suggest answers. If something like "drop@dead.com" appears in the header, then the WSF should just click the option 'fake email'. Perhaps the WSF would only need to click a check box to confirm that "V/1/A/6/R/A" is a drug and categorize the spam. Other times the WSF can actually type in the answer to the spammer's quasi-CAPTCHA, and then the SpamSlam function can do something. At the bottom of the 'exploded email' in Pass 0, there will be the usual submit button.
After the WSF submits that Pass 0 form, more analysis can begin. The data is no longer raw, but partly analyzed, and the system can start checking domains, registrars, relays, fancier types of header forgery, MX records, categories of crime, email routings, and even things like countries hosting the spammer. This kind of analysis will probably take a bit of time, but a new Pass 1 form will be prepared for the WSF to consider. Basically, this would mostly be a confirmation step for the obvious counteractions. That's stuff like complaining to identified senders and webhosts, but also things like reporting open relays and spambots. It also needs more flexibility and 'other' options in the responses at this point--we all know the spammers are cons
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Batten down the handles - this teacup's in for a stormy night!
If blogger sucks, why don't you just buy your own domain and start blogging on that? I am sure it does it's job for most people who are using it. btw I think most people stopped blogging when myspace came along, and the other, more serious bloggers, have their own host or got a better service.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
I have had a Blogger page for some time and always found it odd how poorly the integration was between blogger and other Google services was. For example, I wanted to add Adsense ads to my blog. I found there was a handy 'adsense' element that I could add so I gave it a try. But it was so limited (minimal formatting available, inability to center the ads) I just ended up using the generic 'javascript' element and pasting my own code.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Long ago, I set up a blogger account and blog. Arguments that it was high in pretension and low in substance would be met with nods of sheepish agreement. I forgot about the blog. I did.
Then, one day, motivation won the arm-wrestle, temporarily usurping from its throne the long-reigning King Lethargicus. I was to blog again. My Remo Williams-inspired finger board had my tiny-typers in full prep. I attempt to log on. Bad user/pass combo. A quick grep through my password-only usb-thumb-drive would confirm the user/pass I was entering were correct - but I quickly learned that confirmation != access. Now I have an orphaned blog to whom I cannot authenticate.
Any ideas as to how a mere mortal would prove to the Donoevillains (trade marked) that the blog is mine to solve this puzzler?
Ehrm, what /is/ "Blogger"? I know of a lot of Google services, but this one I don't. Perhaps it's just not interesting enough a service to put much effort into.
IMO they are also neglecting Picasa, especially the Picasaweb. Adobe and Flickr are doing a much better job of updating their online photo sharing sites. What about Google Finance, Google Talk, and even Google Docs. All things that seen to be lagging in development.
> Is Blogger destined to be a sideshow...?
Could well be. I'd demand a refund.
There are plenty of examples of other companies that are behind the curve in some respect or another. In most cases people do the rational thing -- they vote with their feet. Er, fingers. So why is this a story? Because it's Google.
People tend to tip over the tallest ivory towers, and shorter ones get left alone. This tendency is so strong that people fail to recognize when they're complaining about something that's not only free, but intended to be a billboard for their host's advertising, something which in other situations would be the focus of their complaints.
Mark my prophecy: Someday some company is going to produce a desktop Linux so good that it's going to catch on and become if not a major competitor in the OS market, then at least the major distro of Linux. And they will suffer the same fate, becoming the punching bag of the Linux community, while lesser distros have no fewer problems and gather fewer complaints. And of those complaining, many will have obtained the free version of the distro. They will be out nothing, but will feel somehow justified because of the stature of their target, and will do so with gusto despite the fact that equally good distros are available to which they could switch. This irrationality will escape them, as it does the author of TFA.
The nature of the beast here is cognitive dissonance and perceived value. Biggest gets equated with best. Best carries the same weight as monetary investment, in that it's a perceived value, the association with the biggest name being the source of that. But when there is no actual investment the fact of the lack of actual investment fact starts to come to mind. The contradiction produces cognitive dissonance. To suppress that, the complaining becomes more vehement in this situation than in equally problematic situations with products or services of less perceived value garnering fewer complaints. So strong is this tendency that even when there is actual value in terms of money spent, the amount of complaints is out of proportion with the number of problems compared to other products or services that can even cost less or nothing.
Evidence to support the above assertion? Simple: it continues to occur even when those suffering from the contradiction are made aware of it. Even when told they are wearing Don Quixote's hat, they will still tilt at that largest windmill. Just watch.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
What good are they? The only reason why a blogger would need to post something in the future is if it's a suicide note. Oh right.. blogs.. emos.. I forgot.
;)
Mood: Brooding and Mysterious. (And anonymous to avoid the fire
There are _dozens_ of decent, free to use blogging software packages out there. Anyone with "hello world" experience in PHP or Ruby could make one in about an hour anyway. If Blogger isn't keeping up with features then why care? I mean really... why? Better software has died an untimely firey death than Blogger (Amiga Workbench, I mourn you still...)
Get with the times. Besides, real men never blogged.
Perhaps they prefer Orkut? Then again I don't use Orkut so I don't know if it's in a better situation.
I would imagine Blogger is better and more well know so they should drop Orkut and focus on one but if Blogger is really popular already they may feel they don't have to waste the resources.
Google will just acquire some other company that already developed all these new Blog features and then just implement them into their own. Same goes with the Captcha security issue.
Actually, Google has something much better than Pages, namely Google Sites. Unfortunately, you only get it with Google Apps, and you still get Pages for your domain's home page.
I think they should scrap Pages, replace it with Sites, and add subversion access, like they do with the Code Wiki.
Speaking of the Code Wiki, that should probably also be replaced with Google Sites...
Blogger is odd. It was one the first things out of beta but curiously felt (to me anyway) more beta than many of the other products still in beta. It still does. It's seriously lagging behind Wordpress in most everything.
However, in the face of little to no competition, the biggest area of neglect-concern is that of Search. It's far from perfect. In fact becoming less so with time due to the ever-higher number of people figuring out new ways to game Google search. Does it really take another couple of guys working in a garage somewhere to come up with the new search paradigm -- or could Google develop it themselves if they concentrated on their core business, and left blogging etc to others who specialize?
Google seriously needs competition - it's good for everyone, including Google.
Google offers a number of services that don't make money. Why should they put more effort into them?
Even ads on the "Google Content Network" aren't worth much to actual advertisers. There's a class action lawsuit against Google over this. AdWords customers are complaining that it's hard to opt out of running, and paying for, ads on the "Google Content Network". Ads on search result pages are valuable, but there's a growing opinion, backed up by ROI measurements, that putting vaguely relevant ads on random sites is just a money drain on advertisers.
Here's a step by step guide to what you have to do, as an AdWords customer, to turn off the running of your ads on the "Google Content Network". (After you've finished the setup phase, during which you're not offered an opportunity to opt out, click on "Edit Campaign Settings" and un-check the "Content Network" box).
For Google, Blogger is just a way to generate cheap pages for the "Google Content Network".
Add Google Reader (RSS feed agregator) to the list of neglected applications.
I use it solely because it works with some high-volume feeds - and other clients even with tight refresh timeouts missing messages (especially when my PC is not connected). But then with the high volume feeds you get literally no service: search and tagging in Google Reader is probably poorest search and tagging in whole set of Google applications.
Forums are filled with simple requests - yet for the past two years none of them were heard/ fixed/implemented in Reader.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Google puts their resources behind their big money makers, how shocking. It is a free service that isn't a huge revenue source for the company, why are people complaining? If blogging is that big of a deal to you then pay the cash necessary to get what you want instead of relying on Google.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
The email address the Usenet post claims to be from is not authenticated in most Usenet servers. Maybe Google Groups now limits these to be Gmail addresses; or maybe not. But what I have found is that virtually all of this recent dramatic rise in spam on Usenet is from the actual Google Groups servers, with googlegroups.com in the Message-ID header (not gmail.com). I could not see any means for a Google Groups user to override the message ID, so I blocked all posts based on the message ID. Since the message ID is part of the index data, these posts can be blocked before their contents is obtained. So this works and gains the efficiency of not pulling the blocked post contents at all. This is with the tin news reader. It has nearly completely eliminated the spam with only a small amount of collateral damage (which is mostly people that think Google Groups is just some big web forum). This still lets people who post at other Usenet servers to use their gmail.com email address as the sender address without being blocked.
Unfortunately, Google decided to require using Gmail addresses for all new signups of Google services, and push users of other email addresses to use Gmail addresses. They could not have easily done that without opening Gmail addresses to anyone to sign up for. That is most unfortunate, because the old method of requiring an invitation provided a way to backtrack where spammer signups were coming from. Under the old method, if a Gmail user is determined to be a spammer, the other Gmail user that invited the spammer could at least have invitation credits revoked, and other accounts invited by that user could be closed as well. Without the invitation system, there is no longer any tracking like this. IMHO, what Google should have done was set up another separate domain name for non-invited email users.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Blogger is free. How do you gripe to this extent about a free service? Host your own damn blog.
People keep coming back to its beta, but there is a level of trust that they are breaking with the beta users. Blogger is one example another one is Grand Central, heck they havn't done anything over there except to completly ignore their users and not make any progress on the technology. I think they are starting to spread themselves to thin and losing site of providing a great tools and great customer service. It feels like another Microsoft in the making.
get wordpress and use one of the many free wordpress servers listed on its website and you can give blogger the laugh. If its a piece of junk, why use it?
Have you ever noticed that any site with javascript shows up as blank on a google search?
It truly amazes me that there are so many web monkeys who are absolutely clueless about this. One would think that this would be pretty embarassing.
The same holds true with Flash-based sites. But hey, who cares if your site doesn't show up on a Google search, right?
Of course, Google could actually start caching the javascript and flash stuff. But that would expose them to some absolutely delicious security hacks.
I guess it all boils down to the Google foks knowing what they are doing, and the typical web-monkey not having a concern or a clue.
Which of course gives a serious competitive advantage to the sites which do understand what's going on.
The moral of the story is you get what you pay for in the Website creation biz.
Sitting around whining that something has been broken "for years?" Get a freaking life. If it sucks so bad, move on. Picturing you steaming in some dark basement about the inadequacies of an irrelevant web site makes me crack up.
Here's a site on the subject: improve usenet
You can upload your own index.html, you just can't set it as the default page to serve. Big fucking deal, you have to make your users type in an extra couple characters to get to your page. That wasn't even the issue I was responding to, much less a serious issue for a FREE host that doesn't allow any of the features necessary for a decent webpage anyways.
yes
I think Google have a wide enough base of things they either developed in-house or bought from elsewhere to stop adding new stuff, sit back, take a good hard look at what they've got, and start refining and integrating things.
I've got a Gmail account and a YouTube account. Start rolling those up. Ditch the Google Video interface entirely and forward it all to YouTube. Make GrandCentral tie in to Google Chat. Make the Google Homepage thing connect better with stuff like Bookmarks.
Google is becoming a huge, sprawling mass which may contain all the worlds' information, but doesn't put any of it at my fingertips. Why do I have loads of distinct search boxes for emails, calendar, contacts, RSS feeds, groups, chats etc when they could be one single search box for "My Stuff".
It just needs a group of people to look over everything and force every single development team to make it all work together, make the UIs consistent and so on. It's a lot of work, but it's something that has to be done every so often to stop things falling apart. Google's grown quickly and messily enough that it now needs a serious spring clean, and they sure could afford it instead of spending $500 million on a small company with a slightly cool technology which will languish at the bottom of the "other things we do" list.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Blogger is easy. It allows Javascript (unlike Wordpress). Its newest templates are pathetically easy to set up--maybe two minutes. Automatic RSS feed built in. I have a standing offer to help newbies set up a blog. I'll set it up, populate it with appropriate widgets, make them an author and even an admin, and butt out of their lives. I can stick a blog roll on there in 30 seconds flat. If they want something else, they just email me. Google allows me as many blogs as I want. I know it sounds impossible, but some people can't do it. I use blogger because it really takes no time at all, but the newbie thinks I'm God. So what else is new? It doesn't do everything, but it doesn't NEED to. Remember the saying: Good, fast, cheap. Pick any two. Well, blogger is fast and cheap. And frankly, I think it is pretty good, too. I know it's not as good as vi, but Hey! Some of us have a life--and a girlfriend.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
U ever notice they never allowed embedded Youtube videos & Picasso images in GMail? Maybe it's too obvious a feature to get headlines in a time when the only thing getting hits is "Turtle synchronicity".
The whole phenomenon of blogging proves that a million monkeys with a million typewriters will not recreate the works of Shakespeare.
On several servers, not only blogs, but basicly public, or highly active blogs or user forums. A few people like to sit an make many, many names and using proxys keep connecting an signing into blogger. Its not automated but just about 5 or so people that are actually using up there time, to just sit around making bunch of names an trying to use 1 proxy at a time to do so. On that proxy they will change the dns entry. To appear as more then one person, which, after you enter your registry captcha thats basicly all the prompt you have to fill out one captcha till you post on anothers forum, but then there is a captcha code if you apply the option to your account. But in order to register you have to fill out the form and captcha. Google just doesn't show any security measures in place. If the page has content applied to it. The person who applied it to that site will see it in the time to come. Besides why tell the pathetic users that attempt to play spoof and fool, whats to happen, when they are specifically, taking they're own time, too try an exploit, a open source or public chat forums?
The last thing I want is for some poor, info-starved addict to enter a search and come across my meandering, opinionated bullshit... oops, I mean... My Blog. Because, believe me, I am sick of seeing half-assed blogs and techtalk from 4 years ago on the first page or two of Google results. Enough, Already!
I read people's blogs. They are great, and I advocate for everyone having at least one. But, why not let us search blogs, specifically, and leave the general search for data that has been 'vetted' in the most minimal sense? Nobody wants censorship here, and that includes me, absolutely. And I realize that blogs are sometimes heavily topic-oriented, so, maybe there is some way, through filtering that they could be included, and yet have more meaningful results in searches. I don't know.
Maybe it's just me (it probably is, seeing as how I'm bitched out with chemo side effects) but it seems that Google search results are getting less and less relevant. Are the Firefox programmers involved in it somehow? [laughs] Or maybe it's the same crew responsible for slowly destroying NEXTSTEP, I mean, OS X. (slowly used in the loosest sense)
Just last week I started my own blog (dewin-cymraeg.blogspot.com) and was surprised at how unbranded it was. It seems to me that Google should probably brand it more obviously as a Google product. Also, it's not a one-click operation to get Google Analytics working with it. Not difficult, but not really easy - although they do have a link to AdSense (which I'm not so interested in - especially as no-one has visited my blog yet!).
I moved my blog to Novoya (www.novoya.com)and never looked back. In case you don't know about this new service- It is a free blog and site platform and was developed from the professinal Codeingiter php framework community and it shows.
That one worries me a lot more, no word at all on FF3 support (yes, I know it's in beta - there's still been no word, despite a heap of attempts to contact them by people on the google firefox addons newsgroup.) :/
It should be noted that the Scheduled Posting mentioned in the summary is not available in "regular" Blogger, but only in Blogger In Draft, which is kind of like their beta site for Blogger. You still access all your same posts and everything, just have access to new features. So most normal Bloggers (capital B) will not even know this exists, I didn't until today and I use it regularly.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
To report usenet spam to the source ISP site, forward the message with ALL its original headers to the address in the Complaints-to: header. (In Thunderbird, I first View Headers All, then forward as attachment.) For messages sent from Google groups, the Complaints-to header will be something like groups-abuses(a)google.
To view the original headers in google groups, click 'more-options' then 'show original'.
If you're logged in to google groups you can also click 'more-options' then 'Report this message' and describe what is wrong with it ("spam advertising spamsite.com").
It may take a long time for anything to happen (month?) but I have seen spam messages disappear from google groups. Maybe it will be faster if more people report problems.
Where is all this spam abuse people talk about in Google Blogger aka Blogspot?
First of all, anyone who has a Gmail account can create a blog. If I want to create 10,000 blogs to use for spam site redirection, I need to get 10,000 Gmail accounts. That way, when Google tries to communicate about 1 of those 10,000 sites, they will have to go to 1 out of 10,000 accounts. In the last resort, they may terminate the Blog site, and the Gmail account. 1 in 10,000 is not too bad.
So where do I get 10,000 Gmail accounts? Well, heck, that ain't hard. Some enterprising turkey called "William Lim" is selling any number up to 10 Million Gmail accounts over there in the spammer haven, BulkerForum. 10,000 is only a small portion of his portfolio.
Then I have a simple automation tool that cycles to the next one of my list of 10,000 Gmail accounts, logs in, auto-creates a site, and puts in an obfuscated java script that redirects to a spam brand, like "Canadian" Pharmacy - you know, that well documented fake pharmacy using a domain name registered in China, running on a web server in Korea, and if it ships any counterfeit pills or placebos at all, they come from India. Your credit card details and payments go to the herders in Russia, and a month later you find your details have been used to order more domain names.
So you think Google doesn't know all this? Yeah, right. You can see the rate of abuse in the site that builds a list of spamvertized blogspot URLs as they land in the spam-traps. We are talking 600-1000 abuses of the Blogspot terms of service per day. That's about one every 3 or 4 minutes, 24/7!
The abuse list for the last 5 days is updated in real time and is at the URIBL blogspot tracking site
You can even compare how the competitors, Yahoo (Geocities) and Lycos (Tripod) who have been equally abused at the same rate, are performing in handling this issue. The comparison is in the statistics for the blog site hosters