Here’s something I never expected: splogs as a political issue. Actually, it’s allegations of political blogs being splogs, or rather allegations of accusing political blogs of being a splogs in order to get Google to block them. The NYT Bits blog has a post, Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers, that describes the controversy.

“Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service. … In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by activists supporting Senator Obama. According to the bloggers, the Obama supporters had clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs alerting Google that they were spam.”

Maybe this is a good reason to rely on the judgment of machines, at least until they start running for office.

Related posts:

1. The other face to splogs
2. Welcome to the Splogosphere: 75% of new pings are spings (splogs)
3. Fighting kleptotorial splogs
4. Guardian on splogs
5. UMBC blog research on splogs in Baltimore Sun