By Heather Havenstein
July 1, 2008

Google Inc. has found itself immersed in a blogger brouhaha after its Blogger subsidiary shut down the postings of several political bloggers opposing the election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president.

At least seven bloggers who use the Google self-publishing blog service noted that their sites were shut down last week. The blogs were reinstated by Monday, and some of the bloggers posted an e-mail apology from Google. Carissa Snedeker, who blogs about her support for Sen. Hillary Clinton for president at a site called Blue Lyon, posted the e-mail apology sent to her by Google.

In the note, Google said that the Blogger spam filters caused some accounts "to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts." Google went on to note that the company believes that the mistake may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the Just Say No Deal network of anti-Obama blogs, which caused Blogger's system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam.

"Well, don't you think your system should be able to tell a blog with nearly 700 posts and that's been around for oh, say, three years, from a 'spam' blog?" Snedeker noted in her post, which she moved from Blogger to competitor WordPress after the incident. "And in the absence of that sort of flagging on your end, how's about a little benefit of the doubt for the next set of bloggers that get caught in your 'automated spam detection' maze?"