The Daily Novel

Ever since I moved onward and upward to the wonderful new version of the WordPress program the type size of my posts has become so minute that I need a magnifying glass to read it myself. Under the version I could control the type size in several ways, but I am now in a new ballgame. Readers will have noticed that I have been trying to rectify this, with the help of my very good friend trial and error.

I managed to increase the size. But it made all the posts I had made before the change look like those big type books for the old folks you see so much of today. Which means that even before they have read what I have to say it seems that I am shouting at the readers.

In the midst of all these unwanted technical work a message popped up on screen telling me that my Registry needed updating. Now I am not really sure what the registry is, but I do know that it does something very important and that it is nothing to do with marriage.

I thought in my innocence that it was Bill Gates’ lot helping me to keep my computer in good shape. So I pressed the buttons and had my Registry scanned. I gazed in horror as the the cursor sped across the screen with an ever-increasing number of errors in my Registry that needed fixing. The final total was 1647 errors. So I pressed the next button to have them dealt.

Only then did I realise that this was not part of the service you get in return for the high prices you pay for Microsoft products. It was another company who had found its way on to my computer and calls itself, Advanced Registry Optimiser. They want me to pay £19.95 to fix it, on a bargain trial offer.

No thinks. There probably is a way of cleaning it up with a Microsoft program already on my computer. Tedious. But I will look for it as a matter of urgency.

As soon as I have got the type size right, so that people can read this and further installments of my gripes about how companies treat us.

p>By co-incidence the electorate in the US and Britain is sending an increasing number of clear messages that they want change. According to an opinion poll in this morning’s London Times 55 per cent of Labour Party supporters want Gordon Brown to resign. This comes on top of the May Day Massacre when Labour did worse in the local elections than forty years and when it lost the high profile job of Mayor of London to a new Conservative many people had written off as a buffoon. In the US Hillary Clinton failed to gain her expected convincing win in the Indiana primary. She won, but by the wafer thin majority of 50.9 per cent against 49.1 per cent. She was expected to lose in North Carolina, which also declares yesterday, but not by as wide a margin as 56.2 per cent to 41.5 per cent. This result was better than Obama supporters were hoping for, because their candidate has had his back against the ropes for the last two weeks. Pastor Wright, who has been his long-standing friend as well as his priest, has made a series of inflamatory speeches, which has heightened racial tension and caused the commentators to wonder whether the US is ready to elect a black President.

Yesterday’s results in the US mean that Obama will end up with a convincing majority of the voters in the primary elections, whatever happens in the last few small primaries still to come. That means that Hillary Clinton can only win in the senior Democratic delegates cast their votes against the popular will.

In Britain, Gordon Brown is constitutionally entitled to contine to govern for another two years, although it is very risky for any prime minister to hang on to the last minute. And a lot can happen in two years. Nevertheless the chances of the electorate changing its mind before the next election is remote. And Gordon Brown’s authority over his party is seriously damaged, as evidenced yesterday when Labour’s leading Scot, Wendy Alexander, called for a referendum on Scottish independence, the day after Brown had said it was totally un-necessary.

Two leaders who have scored many successes and now find their lives unfolding like a Greek tragedy.

Two years ago Hillary Clinton was the unchallenged front runner for the Democratic nomination and in a year the Democrats looked set to end eight years of Republican rule. The prize has been snatched from her by a relatively inexperienced Senator, whom people had heard of in America, let alone the world at large. But she does have the power to rewrite her biography, so that it does not end in tragedy. If she goes on she runs the risk of seeing her party lose next November. John McCain is a formidable opponent, who appeals to many independents, and, who in clear fight against Obama, may well win the votes of those many worried Americans, who think that national security and the wilting economy, is best entrusted to the older man. To win Obama needs the campaigning expertise of the Clinton supporters and the votes of the white working class, many of whom are devoted to the Clintons.

But if Hillary acknowledges defeat now there is still time for her to claim an important ministerial post in an Obama government and end her political career with some substantial achievments. This is a realistic possibility because there are few important policy differences between Clinton and Obama. They are natural allies, split apart because they both want the top job at the same time.

Gordon Brown is not so lucky. The electorate has signalled that it wants a change from New Labour who has ruled since 1997, and Gordon Brown was one of its principal architects. If he soldiers on til 2010 and, even worse, leads Labour into the next election, he is likely to end his career as the man who led Labour to a landslide defeat.

Despite the May Day massacre there is no queue of candidates jostling to take over from Brown. There is no evidence of any moves to stab him in the back, or even put up a stalking horse candidate at the next Labour Party conference. Worried though they are as they see their majorities waste away, Labour MPs know that a bitter fight for the leadership could make the situation even worse.

In order for Labour to have even a chance of winning the next election, it needs to go into that election under a new leader, with a new set of policies. In this age of the mass media the new leader will have to establish himself or herself with a face as recognisable to the voters as that of David Cameron, the Conservative leader.

Nevertheless, Brown does have some chance of taking over the authorship of his own personal biography. All he has to do is to put the interests of the party first.

He did it once before at the famous Granta dinner he had with Tony Blaiir, shortly after the hopes of Labour revival had been dealt a savage blow by the early death of John Smith, who was proving to be an outstanding leader. Brown agreed to throw his support behind a Blair leadership bid, although at the time, Brown was the more experienced and higher profile figure. Blaiir, for his part, promised that he would hand over the reins of power to Brown at some un-specified time in the future.

New Labour succeeded beyond its wildest dreams And it could not have succeeded without Brown’s skilful handling of the economy. But Blair, like many before him, got to fond of power. He did not fulfil his promise until 2007. Had he stood down at the election of 2005, Brown would have come to power with his leadership endorsed by the vote of the electorate.

He has a right to feel disgruntled. And those many commenators who have written that he is a psychologically flawed personality and are writing now that Brown has no leadership qualities, are not paying sufficient attention to the force of events in the destinies of us all.

Much has been written in the last few months about Brown’s clumsiness and his clunking fist. That side of his personality does exist and it has got him into trouble. But there is another side, which is visible on those rare occasions when he smiles.

It is perfectly possible for Labour to have an election for a new leader that will not split the party if Brown decides to resign. Labour has several cabinet ministers with the experience and personality to take over the leadership, and not a few of them are women.

But time is running out. Brown needs to make his decision now. So that the rivals for the leadership can begin to emerge into public view now. The timing of the leadership battle needs to be either just before or just after the autumn Labour Party conference if Labour is going to have a chance of winning the next election.

If Brown does that he will have the gratitude of all Labour Party voters. And he willl have a choice of several elder statesman jobs. He is still only 57, though in recent months he has began to look older.
/p>

Hilliary is smiling……..

………but she probably feels as disgruntled as Gordon.

Photos from Reuters and The Times

This is one of those highly scientific newspaper surveys done on a Sunday afternoon, when the editor of the day is whipping the journalists unlucky enough to be on the Sunday rota to produce some interesting copy for the Monday paper. The size of the sample is 58, which is substantially more than the number of Labour MPs even the most energetic political journalist could ring on a Sunday to get a view as to whether they thought Gordon Brown should resign before he does even more damage. This is the kind of research journalists do before they write those stories which start ‘Most Labour MP’s think……’.

In my new found zeal to keep my computer clean, before lunch I went into the folder where the WordPress Spam filter, Akismet, places those comments on my blog which it thinks are spam, and pressed Delete All. When I checked this evening there were already 58 new comments awaiting my moderation.

I scrolled down through the whole lot. And found that 57 of the comments were most definitely Spam. Roughly 70 per cent were clearly motivated by greed - attempts to use my blog to get people to spend their money in casinos, or buying mobile phone ring tones, insurance, etc, etc.

The other 30 per cent were apparently designed to appeal to lust. Or at least that is what I first thought. But then I went through again. They were not comments from individuals hoping to satisfy their urges by finding partners on the net, they were attempts to get them to spend their money on buying sex products.

There was one comment, which appeared to be a rcoherent and easoned discussion of rape and how it should be dealt with. So with fear and trepidation I clicked on the link. Only to find that it was trying to get my readers to buy the Best Rape Movies.

So the result of my survey has produced what the Sunday afternoon journalist survey never produces. One hundred per cent agreement. All of today’s Daily Novel spammers are concerned, not to get my readers into bed but to take money out of their pockets.

My life has been so dominated by matters computing since my blog was blacked by Google because of a Chinese bug that had reached me from a not so slow boat from China, that I cannot even spell let alone write coherently. It is not only the hours of work that has been necessary it is the emotional strain. Since I know enough about computing to know that such bugs can lead to the horrors of identity theft, I had to be extra careful not to do anything which might make things even worse, by exposing my friends and readers to the horrors of identity theft.

That risk is now over, I hope. But in order to make my site more secure in future I have had to update to WordPress 5. Which meant, given my still imperfect knowledge of WordPress, that I have might have disabled myself from being able to blog at all, and lost the results of nearly two years work.

Yesterday, after several hours of work, Ii pressed the key which commited my site to the WP5. And then I pressed another key to get back into my blog. Only to get an error message. I thought I had fowled up but happily I had only made a minor mistake, which I was able to rectify.

Today, I was hoping to get back to writing blogs, and one part of my mind was already writing about the May Day massacre of Gordon Brown, the astonishing rise of the bicycling bonkers Boris Johnson, and how Obama is standing up to strain of the Presidential campaign, now that the racial undertones have erupted thanks to the further inflammatory statements, pedalled in many parts of the media, of his Pastor.

But I realise that before I can concentrate on the content of my blogs I have to spend more hours learing about the new version of WordPress.

Crises like these drive me to the manic side of my manic depressive temperament, which is exhiliarting, but also dangerous, because in manic overdrive, I am not always accessible to the needs of others around me.

It also leads me to try and do several things at once.

On Friday I had decided needed to know a lot more about WordPress. And I had discovered that WordPress developers run WordCamps, where they gather together to discuss and solve problems. There is one in Paris this weekend, and manic Bob wanted to jump on a plane at Exeter airport on Friday night and join them for the weekend. Until he realised that would have meant him spending most of his time on the logistics of getting there. Starting with finding out whether you actually can fly to Paris from Exeter and whether there are any seats on the plane.

So I have decided go to the first UK Word Camp, which is in Brimingham on 19 July. If you are interested the URL is http://wordcampuk.bluemilkshake.co.uk/.

You will have to type it in yourself. Because I have not yet learnt how to insert links into WP5.

Not much blogging in the last few days because I have been trying to deal with the warning put up by Google that my site might ‘damage your computer’. I called in Spy Doctor and he found, as I reported in a blog last week, that my computer was clean. I dashed off several emails to people who know about such things but I only received one reply, which was no help. I tried yet more searches on the internet, then gave up and read Technology Guardian. There on the front page was an interview with Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who is a ‘brainy 38-year-old professor of cyberlaw at both Oxford and Harvard universities’.

The interview was pegged to his new book, ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It’, which has some challenging ideas which appealed to me. Maybe he was the sort of bloke who could help me in dealing with Goliath Google, who was opressing Daniels of the web like me. Before I emailed him I checked him out and found he was part of an organisation called StopBadware.org, which was supported by Google. Maybe he was on the side of my enemy.

But I was desparate, so I dashed off an email to him. I got a reply within the hour. Not from him, but from one of the StopBadware staff called Emily. She told me that I had indeed been infected by malicious software, and that Spy Doctor had not found it, because it was not on my computer, but in my web space. Not only that, in her long email, she gave me several links which helped me to understand the nature of the problem and how to deal with it.

To give you the short version. My problem arose from a bit of code inserted in my blog called iframe. The iframes, hosted on sites in Beijing, China, attack a visitor’s computer with the virus JS_PSYME.XP. With her help I was able to delete this, and other things which might be dangerous. But I was still concerned about getting the Google warning removed, which they said could take three weeks.

The first paragraph of her reply to my concerns plunged me into despair. Here it is:

The hackers running the site that the iframe leads to can change what malware is being distributed whenever they like, so as far as I know several different things have been distributed through this iframe (the hackers likely rent it out as a service to criminals who want to distribute viruses, keyloggers, whatever). So I don’t know what was on your site at any given point.

That really plunged me into gloom. Maybe I had infected all the family’s computers and those of all my readers.

So I decided to have my dinner.

After dinner, I googled myself before going to bed and discovered to my amazement that the Google warning had been removed. Wonder of wonders I was now officially clean. But before I could start blogging again, I had to download the latest version of WordPress, which I use for writing this blog. This took several hours, with the nail-biting risk that I would end up by not being able to blog at all. But I finally got it up and running.

Only to find that they have changed the format. And I cannot see any way of doing some key things to make my blog more readable, by indenting quotes and using bold and italics. And I cannot see how to put in links to my blog, so that readers go, with a click of the mouse, to useful sources I have found. So I can put in a plug for Zittrain’s book, but if you want to get it for £18 (£2 discount) you will have to type in yourshelf, www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

Which brings me back to Google. From what I know now, I am grateful to them for alerting me to the malacious software on my blog. But, though their email to me, did include the url for the specific post that contained the bug, which was as far back as 10 December 2007, I did not realise its significence.

Google, WordPress and the others in the game, are companies which have acquired enourmous power, through their techical expertise. And they are concerned, for economic reasons, to automate as much as possible.

But this does not take account of the needs of the citizen journalists, and millions of other computer users, who do not have the techical expertise to handle this overload of automated information.

There are two important points to be made about my experience.

The first is that if Google’s message should have had an additional explanatory sentence, telling me that the malacious software was contained in the December 10 post, but that it was in computer code, which I would have to uncover before I could deal with it.

The second is that all companies, not just computer companies, need to review their present reluctance to make human beings available to deal with customers. It is expensive, but the any company which bucks the current fashion, and provides real person to person help, is likely to gain by grabbing more customers. Because the cost in time and money to the customers who cannot easily get help is huge.

In my recent experience this help was provided by an associate of Harvard, which for educational reasons wants to keep close to customer needs. But Google should do more itself. As should the others.

The Chinese bug could have done incredible damage to me and my readers. I totally accept what I have been told by StopBadware. As to why those who put it in my webspace did not take advantage of it, I can only conjecture. Maybe they were trying to sell it someone else. And maybe they have so many such things to sell, that no-one was interested in hacking into a modest blog like mine.

Sitting in the rain in the car park at Tesco in Axminster at midday gazing out at a scene of total gloom. Not a refreshing April shower but an unrelenting downpour that has been going on all morning. And a sky which is promising that it will go on all afternoon. In front of me tanned young men, coatless and hatless, are running from their cars to the shelter of the store. Little old ladies are struggling to control their trolleys and their umberellas as they hurry out with their groceries. And one of the few carless shoppers, a middle-aged Chinese woman,  sitting on the seat beside, hoping against hope, that the rain would stop. After a wait of ten minutes or so, she shrugged her shoulders, took up her trolley, and walked off to the ramp that leads into the town. Not only did she not have a car, she did not have an umbrella. So she will got seriously wet.

This is the sort of weather which drives those prone to SAD (seasonal affective depression) to despair. And it plunged me into the glooms when I was a boy whenever it happened during the cricket season. Depression, as anyone who has suffered from it will tell you, is different from ordinary sadness. When it hits it leaves you with no energy to do anything, because the way you feel it seems like anything you do is not going to make any difference.

Back here in my bungalow the wind is up and rain is spattering the window panes. Portland Bill is hidden by the murk but I can see the beach, which is deserted, but the light brown sand relieves  the greyness. And the dark green sea is ligthtened by row upon row of frothy white horses.

Quite apart from the weather I have another reason to sink into depression. The chances are that most of the potential readers who happen upon this post via Google will not read it, because of the warning message that Google has put up, warning them that reading my blog may harm their computer. I have as yet had no useful reply to the emails I dashed off a couple of days ago asking for help and guidance as to how to get this warning removed, now that Spy Doctor has pronounced my computer free of even low risk dodgy software. And I realise it may take several days or weeks to get clearance. Or worse that I might not ever be able to move the mighty Google Goliath with my puny catapult.

But as of now I have not sunk into depression. My energy took me to the keyboard as soon as I returned from Axminster. To write, amoungst other things, about the paradox. One of the reasons I have chosen to live in Dorset, is that it does have areas like Egdon Heath, desolate exposed heathland that even today can be life-threatening if you get lost in the mist and have inadequate clothing. I knew that from the novels of Thomas Hardy, long before I had visited Dorset.

Though Hardy’s novels are depressing, in that many of his heroes and heroines come to a sorry end, because of fatal flaws in their own personalities, or because of  the forces of nature or because of the hostile behaviiour of other human beings, they did not depress me. On the contrary they helped me deal with my own teenage depression. I was inspired, for instance, by the story of that pregant Hardy heroine who has to get herself to hospital across Egdon heath on the bleakest of bleak days. Alone. She makes it by aiming for the next milestone, dragging herself along, clinging to it, while she rests, before setting off for the milestone ahead.

I still think of her now, when I am climbing a steep hill towards the end of the day, tired and short of breath. Like her, I target a place I can see ahead, where I can sit down and rest, to recharge my batteries before I press on towards the next milestone.

I thought of her when last Thursday night when I was listening to Claire Tomalin talking in Sturminster Newton about her biography, Thomas Hardy, The Time-Torn Man, now available in paper-back as well as hard-back. One of the main points of her talk, and her book, is that although Hardy lived long enough to win national and international acclaim, he died a disappointed man. He lived to write poetry. He wrote his novels to earn sufficient money to enable him to go on writing poetry. He wrote, some excellent poems, but even today he is has not achieved the five-star rating he longed for.

This mattered to Hardy. More than it should have done. Because he did not compromise his poet’s heart, when writing his novels. He was not attempting to write best-sellers, although several of the novels he wrote, became best-sellers. He had quite a battle with publishers to get his first great novel, The Return of the Native, published. Tomlin writes:

The greatness of The Return of the Native is that it as much the work of Hardy the poet as Hardy the novelist. All his novels have elements of poetry, but this is the first in which, although he had made his concepts into fiction, essentially he is setting down a poetic dream.

But not a Hollywood dream with a happy ending. As Tomlin notes:

Dreams, or nightmares. His tale ends in tragedy for most, three of the principal figures caught up in flight and disaster ending in death……….

Hardy wrote the Return of the Native in 1878, during the two years he lived in the house at Sturnminster Newton, pictured at the top of this blog, which we visited before the talk. Hardy did not much like the house, which is you can see is boring villa. But he loved the view over the Dorset countryside and down the River Stour towards the elegant bridge which leads into the centre of the town.

The picture below is of Claire Tomlin talking to three teenage girls, (who I did not get in the picture because I zoomed the phone too much to get a close up of the author). Yes, the teenagers told her, they were doing Hardy for A-levels.

But if it was a duty visit, they were clearly enjoying it. And their presence cheered me up. The book is not dead. These 2008 teenagers were not spending the evening drinking themselves into a stupor in the high street, or losing their money in New Labour’s casinos, or watching soap operas on one of the hundreds of channels showing them.

This cheered me up somewhat. Because I am writing this on the day all the media are full of stories about the Austrian man, who fathered children through incest with his own daughter, and kept her and them locked up in a cellar for more than twenty years. And all that time he was going out to do the shopping and chatting to neighbours, who, apparently, thought he was an ordinary human being, not the ogre he was. And all of it happening in a small town which is about the same size as Sturminster Newton, and where the houses are cheek by jowl.

Hardy, who wrote uncompromisingly about flawed human beings, who committed some atrocities against their nearest and dearest. But nothing in Hardy’s imaginings is anythting near to the inhuman behaviour of Jozef Fritzel.

As I wrote this paragraph I realised that the rain had stopped. The sun is now shining. I can just see the outline of Portland Bill through the mist. And there are three human figures on the beach. At least they look like human beings, but how can I be sure they are not inhuman beings taking a rest from abusing their nearest and dearest.

In the world of blogging journalism Google as powerful, or much more powerful, than W H Smith was for British newspapers and magazines. W H Smith was not only the largest chain of newsagents in the country, it dominated the wholesale distribution of newspapers and magazines. The nation had reason to be grateful to the high principled Smith family, because they protected the nation’s children by never stocking pornography. For that you had to go the sleazy newsagent in a sidestreet, and reach up to the top shelf.

But Smith’s also used their considerable marketing power to keep adventurous magazines which were challenging the conventional wisdom, like the satirical magazine, Private Eye, and ‘extreme’ left-wing publications, like the Socialist Worker, off their shelves. Which was of course a form of censorship.

Google as the dominant search engine has equivalent power. What their blacking means is that when my American readers key in ‘Obama left handedness’ they cannot read what I have said on this subject, because they are routed to the warning notice from Google. So Google is in fact violating my rights of free speech and my opportunity, via the internet, to have  my say on what is the most important American election of my lifetime.

Although, as I have disclosed as soon as I found it, there were the two questionable programs on my computer, they were not having any effect on my computer, nor on the computer of anyone else I know who has read my blog.

But when I go into newspaper web sites I frequently find annoying popup ads interupting my reading of the article I want to read. Notable offenders are The Times of London and the New York Times. Why doesn’t Google black them?

To return to the general issue. The web makes it possible for the citizen journalist to broadcast his views, but the chances of his getting heard are still very small, given the increasing domanance of the web by the big media groups. Google has a most important role in redressing the balance. And mostly they do that job well enough.

I am not sure how their ranking system works, but it does not seem to discriminate against the lone blogger. Thus, when you key in ‘Obama left hand’, my blog, written on 22 February, is number six of 388,000 references. (Now disfigured by the red ink telling you it may seriously damage your health!)

It is a myth that citizen journalists are powerful. That myth was fuelled by James Murdoch, Rupert’s little boy, in an article in yesterday’s Guardian. This is his opening paragraph:

We are in the middle of a tremendous and welcome shift in power - from elites to individuals and communities. For the media, that means a shift from content controlled by a few to that created, adapted, or distributed by a multitude.

Lower down there is this paragraph:

For many years, Britain had a vibrant and diverse newspaper sector but a stagnant dominant television oligopoly.

Young James writes without any awareness of the fact that his grandad, was a member of the Australian elite, and his fdad, Rupert, was a member of the British elite, tutored by Asa Briggs at Oxford, and taught the British newspaper trade by Ted Pickering at the Daily Express, which was then one of Britain’s most powerful newspapers.

Rupert Murdoch has made the British newspaper industry less diverse. He took over one of only two left wing national papers, The Sun, previously known as The Daily Herald. He converted The Sun to a tabloid and knocked the Mirror off its perch as the biggest mass circulation newspaper, a blow from which it has still not recovered. There is now only one left of centre newspaper, The Guardian, which has a big enough staff to cover international affairs properly.

Murdoch also controls, of course, The Times, and Sky Television, Fox Television in the US and Star in the east. His newspapers and television stations reflect his right wing, anti Europe and born again Christian views. From time to time he supports Labour Party leaders, but he uses his influence to pull them to the right. As he did with Tony Blair and still does with Gordon Brown, who spends more time talking to Murdoch’s men, than he does to trade unionists.

Much of today’s media is controlled by a few big companies, including media on the web, to which all the media groups devote huge resources, far beyond the pockets of citizen journalists.

Google, because of the brilliance of its technical expertise, is in an unrivalled position, to help counteract the power of Murdoch, and the other media barons. They should be using it to promote freedom of speech, not to limit it.

The Spy Doctor says that the suspect software on my computer, removed last night, was a program called Tracking Cookies and another called Adware Advertising. So far as I can glean from the log these programs were monitoring the statistics for my website.

That does not strike me as particularly dangerous.

But maybe it conflicts with Google’s Adsense, which I attempted to sign up for some months ago but was frustrated by the complicated instructions. Or maybe, what Google does not like about my site is the content of the words I write.

I shall continue to try and get some answers. But it may take weeks. Meanwhile I have something to say about Google from a general perspective, which is best done in a separate blog.

On the advice of a friend I downloaded a program called Spy Doctor last night. The Spy Doctor found that I had two suspect programs, which it rated at the lowest level of risk. So readers can be relieved that they will not have caught anything life threatening from reading my blog.

The doctor has now deleted the offening bits of software and pronounced The Daily Novel clean.

It will take me a good deal longer to get the Google black listing lifted. They want me to things that I don’t know how to do, even to find out their reasons for blacking me. And even when I have done all these things they say that it will take several weeks to remove the blot on my blog.

Will report when I have  made further investigations. 

Quite by accident when googling this morning I discovered that Google has blacked my blog. If you key in to Google anything on my blog at the URLs, www.thedailynovel.com and www.xcitybob.com you have a message in red saying that it may damage your computer. Not only that I discovered, when I went into the webmail of my internet provider, 1and1, that they have been blacking it since 17 April1!

They had sent an email telling me of their action to my 1and1 web mail. They gave one specific example of my malicious behaviour. This url: http://www.xcitybob.com/?p=442 refers to a blog which actually praises one giant company, the Daily Mail, for an article they did about the missing canoeist.

Like a good citizen I first tried to discover whether there was anything harmful in my blog. Any possible malicious software I mean, not words I might have written about George W Bush. I deleted a number of comments on my blog, which looked like possible spam which had got through the Word Press filter. And then I spent more time trying to find a way of getting in touch with Google that did not just get an automated response telling me to look at their web pages.

Finally I posted this comment on their Group Discussion on web crawling.

Just discovered that Google has blocked www.xcitybob.com and
www.thedailynovel.com, which are the URLs for my blog, The Daily Novel.
The warning says my blog may harm people’s computers. How can that be
because it has not affected the computers of my wife, children,
friends who read my blog?

The only thing I can think of is that Google is deeming the CONTENT of
my blog ‘malicious’. In some blogs I am highly critical of those who
hold power, including my own university and big companies, though I
cannot remember cannot remember making an attack on Google.

To black stuff like mine is censorship.

But equally obviously if there are things on my site which harms other
computers I would want to remove it immeditately.

So why on earth did Google not simply tell me what it is they think is
harmful in my blog.

Which would have saved me a lot of time this morning trying to find a
way of getting in touch with Google that did not get an automated
response.

Bob Jones

I am not too hopeful of getting anything done, because there seem to be quite a few other people with similar problems posting on the Google discussion group.

But maybe there are some readers who happen on my site who can tell me what is happening, before it is too late.

Because if there is harmful software on my computer, I maybe harming not only myself but my friends and readers too.

If there is not any harmful software on my computer, then Google is doing me considerable harm. I checked Yahoo this morning and they seem to think I am clean.

In cases like this Google should provide the evidence before they use their power to harm others.

Journalism and blogging may not be enough to get them to change their behaviour. So I hope those with similar experiences will get in touch with me.

 Maybe we can get together and consult our learned friends.