"Google removed the blog within hours of the scam coming to light." strange the site is still there

"This isn't the first time Blogspot has been used by scammers. In March, Blogger.com, Google's other web publishing system,"

but Blogspot **is** Blogger (or rather Blogspot is the free web hosting that Blogger provides if you choose not to host your blogger blog on your own website)

Until I upgraded my forum from PHPBB2 to the 3.0 RC1 version, I had almost daily spammers visiting to plant links to their cruddy Blogspot journals.

Most of those journals either redirects you immediately, or has been so customized that it is impossible to find the 'Report journal' link on the page. And finding the page on which to report suspicious journals directly to Google, is frankly, impossible.

Not that it matters, those journals I have reported seems to stay up anyway...

I knew there was something dodgy about the way that Blogspot handled deleted blogs for a while. You may recall that a while back, a somewhat dubious group of anti-pedophile vigilantes got a bunch of LiveJournal accounts suspended. Before that, one of their main activities seems to have been getting pedophiles' Blogspot blogs deleted (for ToS violations or by other means), then hijacking the blog URL (see http://pedoblogtracker.blogspot.com/ for details). This surprised me, as the ability to hijack the URL of a deleted blog had obvious potential for abuse, and it was odd that Blogspot allowed it.

I've known Winn for a number of years. A lot of people would have stood back and waved their hands. He did blame it on Blogspot, but he accepted his part of the problem.

This really is Google's problem.