As for illegitimate sites, Sophos notes that Geocities and Blogger both make it easy for anyone to set up a Web site without much identification. Blogger, owned by Google, is particularly problematic, says Sophos, with the blog site alone accounting for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts. I is not only possible for the Blogger sites to host malicious code, but criminal attackers can also inject links to malicious sites in the comments sections of the blogs.

"Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network."

Reports have come in from a number of cites around the country that the entire Blogspot domain is blocked in its entirety. Just recently only three days back, specifically on the 3rd of May, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority had lifted the entire ban, allowing all internet users unrestricted surfing to the 10 millions websites hosted on the blogspot.com domain. It appears as if the three day relief was just to appease the United Nations in its annual 3rd of May celebrations for the Freedom of Press.

The PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) had initially blocked access to the blogspot domain on the 3rd of March 2006, due to a Supreme Court decision dated 2nd March 2006 instructing the PTA to ban 12 offending websites which highlighted the blasphemous cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). In adherence to the Supreme Court ruling, all 12 sites were blocked including one that was hosted on the blogspot domain. But rather than block the offending blogspot website, the PTA blocked the entire domain (www.blogspot.com) which happens to be one of the most popular blog hosting domains hosting approximately upwards of ten million blogs globally. We strongly oppose this blanket ban on any website, and ask the world to join hands to peacefully protest the censorship of the internet.

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

1. You have always been able to run non-Google services on your blog. In the same way you can use Yahoo's Flickr to post photos to your blog, you can include an MSN Search box in your template. We consider it a violation of the terms to modify the Blogger navbar, but that's not what was reported to have happened here.

2. We did not send a request to have the MSN Search box removed. We reviewed the information that's been made available, and we found no such request from our support teams.

3 .We did not delete nor remove the blog in question from Blog*Spot.

There once was a router so crappy
That it made all the Bloggers unhappy
It caused pagers to be beep
And kept us from sleep
So we smashed it on the ground with golf clubs and threw paving stones
at it and kicked it and someone filmed part of it but that's
not up yet and then we dropped it off a dumpster and kicked it again
and gathered up the parts and sent them to be recycled quite snappy

A clarification about the filer we restored yesterday: This machine is indeed up and functioning again, so the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible. However, it is still not in great shape and we are in the process of moving all the data off of it and on to better machines. So over the next few days there may still be lingering and intermittent problems for some blogs. This includes the "forbidden" errors we're all getting tired of, as well as occasional publishing errors, or incompletely published pages.

Bloggers at the Washington Post are wondering if they should be paid extra. (ex BusinessBlogWire) This made me think about... myself. I'm on unpaid leave from BusinessWeek, and I'm continuing to blog on this commercial site. Is there something wrong with that? True, I'm continuing to receive benefits, including health insurance. But other journalists get the same benefits when they're on leave, and they don't have to blog.

Here's the key: I don't want to stop blogging. If BW kicked me off this site during this leave, I'd start another blog where I'd also blog for free--presumably, with less traffic.

A BlogSpot blogger claims that he received an email from Google saying that the MSN Search box he had placed on his blog violated Blogger's Terms Of Service. The reasoning was that the box was "obstructing Googles services from operating efficiently and effectively". The blogger, Roberto Dohnert, was told to remove the search box, and plans asking Google the question on everyone's mind, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Bloggers in Pakistan became first became aware of the ban on 28 February when they were unable to access a popular blog hosting site, Blogspot.

One of the blocked sites is hosted on Blogspot, which led to the blocking of all web journals hosted on the site.

The Pakistan bloggers found their blogs blocked, even though their blogs are not connected with the cartoons.

They say they have still been able to edit and update their blogs, but not able to read them.

What does "VooDoo Blogger" do? I'll only mention one or two. First - "This software will allow you to easily create 1000/s of blogs fast and easy" and second - "Create custom blog clusters for any niche."

Might you be getting the idea that this is somehow related to the Blogspot Splogs you mentioned?

Go back and look at that "Stealth Advertiser" and you'll see a couple of interesting comments about the "advantages" in the FAQ's.

For years Alexa has provided traffic rankings for Web sites from aarp.org to zappos.com. Then, about five years ago we created some special rules so that we could provide rankings for homepages on sites like geocities and tripod. These rules allowed people to write reviews of their favorite personal homepages, compare traffic rankings, create related links and more.

But we never created similar rules for the blog hosting sites. Sure, you could get a traffic ranking for a blog if it happened to be hosted with its own domain name -- sites like wonkette.com or kottke.org. But, if you were Attu (attu.blogspot.com) you were out of luck. The best you could get was the ranking for your host, blogspot.com, but not for your own blog.

But now that is changing: Alexa is ranking individual blogs.

Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

When a person visiting a blog clicks the "Flag?" button in the Blogger Navbar, it means they believe the content of the blog may be potentially offensive or illegal. We track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable. Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? It's sort of like that.

BlogSpot's new Flag button seems to be getting a lukewarm reception: the Blog Herald is sniffy about it ("a half-arsed effort") but also appears to misunderstand the Blogger Buzz announcement, misinterpreting "a blog has to be republished for this new button to show up" as "it only applies to new blogs". Sorry, but no, that’s not what "republished" means: Blogger republishes a blog when new content is added or when the blogger makes changes. My blogs predate the Flag button but, since I posted new content, carry it.

Weblogs, Inc.'s Unofficial Google Weblog picks up the Blog Herald report and runs with it, perpetuating the "only new blogs" misconception. A familiar pattern of repackaged, and underresearched, reporting.

So while we were writing the story, we kept getting feedback from editors: This paragraph is too BusinessWeeky!

We adjusted. Why? We were writing a magazine piece, albeit one dressed loosely as a blog. We were still operating in a world of magazine constraints, including the new one: that it had to be bloggy. (By the way, I'm not blaming anyone for this. Writing it in this style was my idea...)