04 August 2008

[bloggage] Google Does The Adult Thing

1686.


And by The Adult Thing, that means simply 'fessing up and fixing what you did the best you can.


In this post on Blogger Buzz, they lay thier cards on the table. Thusly:



We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.



Neat enough. As a longtime Blogger user, I've seen various responses to various system problems (no system is perfect). Blogger's response this time was creditable and quick ... impressive, considering the size the problem must have had.


Further:



At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts.



That's a pretty positive attitude to have, especially when you realize that, in as much as I can have myself a blog that everyone can ignore for free and not having to even put up ads if I don't want to, me and people like me are mooching off Google and Blogger. We get this shiznit for free, yo.


But Google and Blogger do have a huge amount of goodwill and reputation hanging on the Blogger/BlogSpot peg. So it's both smart and canny.


But not just that, did you see there? Realizing that nothing is perfect and 99 percent of all good can be lost in one percent of all bad, and no doubt recognizing that WordPress has made backing up a blog to them almost effortless, they've done the canny thing; they now allow you export and back up your entire blog as an XML file. They give the people what they want and look good doing it. A win-win.


The place to find it right now is at Blogger in Draft which is where they roll out the developing tools that are ready to use but just almost ready for prime time. Being who they are, most of thier stuff works just fine even in high-Beta.


This is why Blogger and Google also are still surviving. Sure, they're huge, but if you aren't built well, then you'll Fail Anyway™. So you have quick response to an embarrassing problem combined with savvy service announcements, and everyone wins: Blogger still looks good, and bloggers get a new tool.


Win, win, win.


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