Angela Genusa Told Me

that Dennis Cooper's blog has also been banned, blacklisted, unsubscribed from GOOGLE, whatever you call it.

I was shocked to hear that.

I can't imagine a blog more in keeping with the spirit of celebrating the arts, or one that represents better the best the medium has to offer artists and readers in general.

This is the dumbest form of censorship.

It's censorship by the unconscious (spam bots) at best, and at worse (this is a possibility) it's people targeting free expression and Google violating some of its charter principles.

This is even dumber than when Amazon did that thing where they "disappeared" so many authors from their listings.

Do I smell a class action lawsuit in this?

Or if that's impracticable, some sort of redress anyway.

The reason I respected Blogger and Google for so long was that they seemed to have transcended the WAL-MART model of free expression.

They seemed to be tolerant of the practicable reality of free expression, and the attendant messiness.

They understood the difference between the illegal and the prank, what was legitimate threat and what was merely a threat to somebody's taste.

This is probably really a bandwidth or size issue.

If you're a regular Blogger you've noticed the increase on Blogger recently of dysfunctional aspects (ex. profile counters) and problems that have gone unfixed system-wide.

This trend has been increasing for some time.

And then suddenly they start to wise up a bit: here, let us show you the post you just made and not your entire blog. Let's limit tags. Little steps of parsimony and husbandry in the machine.

I'm not tech-savvy enough to figure out if this latest trend has something to do with system balance (drive blog count down through spam bot traffic shutoffs which lead to blog deletions in frustration?) or not.