Spamblog? moi?

I was away for a week, a whole week! and kind of off the grid, but while I was on the road, I casually deleted a terse email purporting to be from Blogger, claiming that my blog was acting like a spamblog and it would be frozen until I contacted them. And that if I didn't contact them in 20 days my blog would be deleted! I always assume this type of email is phishing, so I hit delete and thought no more about it. But when I went to write a post, it turned out that for some reason, which I have yet to discover, this blog had indeed been locked down. After requesting a review, I can now have access to my blog, but this is the message I see:

Your blog is marked as spam

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on August 25, 2009. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

According to their description, my blog does NOT have the characteristics their algorithm is supposed to detect, and I am not a spammer or a bot, but what a curious incident. In the first moment, I felt guilty, the way I used to feel decades ago when they first installed those anti-theft gates in bookstores and libraries; even though I wasn't stealing, I was sure the alarm would sound and I would be hauled off and searched. As with the annoyance of car alarms and malfunctioning security systems in stores, that initial guilty reaction long ago gave way to exasperation, then resentful acceptance. And as with the security protocols in the airports, where I have been searched and questioned and some folks I know have wrongfully been placed on watch lists, the seemingly random nature of being singled out makes me mistrust the security efforts themselves.

Two seconds later, I didn't feel guilty, I felt annoyed, especially as the notice on my dashboard said my blog would be deleted if I had not responded in 20 days, and I can't remember how long ago I deleted that email! Of course, I haven't backed up the blog; I'm not a business, this isn't work, and I'm lazy. Now, I feel a slight panic: Why was Blogger messing with me when I was so obviously NOT a spammer? What automated detection system had they set up to catch spammers that would catch innocents like me in its trawl? How often will I have to mail in proof of my non-spammer intentions in the future? Is it time to move from Blogger to WordPress?

Poking around, I see I am not alone and that many others have commented, ranted, or analyzed this situation already. Google, which owns Blogger, is trying to control the proliferation of spam and malware, but its response has triggered many of the kinds of reactions I've had: why me? One site, which is politically paranoid in nature, assumed this was part and parcel of an ongoing campaign of political censorship, and who knows? How can we tell? I don't make that assumption in my case because I'm a little nothing in the big blogoverse, but an automated bot can scoop up krill like me along with larger fish, and with our greater reliance on cloud computing, we are also exposed both to malicious spam and the sledgehammer response.