Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Tinklenberg Blog is not spam, nor in any way an improper use. Political or other opinion is what blogging is.

I believe Gary Gross, Let Freedom Ring, is interested in the Sixth District and wanted to see if he had posted on the reported fundraising numbers for the second quarter.

I looked there, and saw this:

I just got this email from Tanner Curl of the Tinklenberg campaign:

Hi Gary,

I saw your post today and wanted to clarify that soon after July 4th I received an e-mail from blogspot, saying we were flagged as possible spam by their little blog bots. They didn’t give a reason. It seemed like an automated e-mail. Our blog was locked until we were cleared of all spam charges today!

And hence, a new post: http://tinklenberg08.blogspot.com/2008/07/were-back.html

Also, we will be continuing the Housing and Mortgages Week at a later date.

I hope that clears things up for you.

-Tanner


I’m sorry to hear that Blogger gave the Tinklenberg campaign these troubles. I know what dealing with Blogger is like. That’s why I left it in March, 2006. I appreciate Tanner’s corerspondence with me and I sincerely hope that their troubles with Blogger are behind them.


Disrespect for over-aggresive thought policing of blogs crosses party lines and belief systems about individual candidates. It is a necessary thing, some blogs can offend and policing is needed to isolate and quarantine patently offensive things without any redeeming social value. While I may appear to believe Elwyn Tinklenberg, himself, fits that criterion, the blog Tanner Curl maintains IS fair use.

I join in what Gary Gross said. Including his criticism of Blogger. Blogger is the devil I know and use, and find frustrating in ways, for instance, try to post a pdf document online via blogger, to link to it.

I kludge around that by cutting things into jpg files, and posting the images - something easy enough to do in Blogger. At some point, many people leave Blogger, with Wordpress often gaining what Blogger loses, and those are technical issues apart from NOT wanting to see over-aggesssive content policing.

To the extent the Tinklenberg blog solicits contributions, that also, in my view is fair use. Courts have wrestled in First Amendment situations with whether and how far to distinguish "commercial speech" from other expression.

If Blogger finds someone operating a business via a blog and wants a fee for that, the situation differs from a basically expressive blog that also solicits political funds. Indeed, Blogger blurs its own lines that way, offering bloggers the option of carrying its pre-screened advertisement content, for cash.

And, Blogger is an arm of Google, for those not already knowing that ownership link.