BLOGHER: Political Blogger Ann Althouse’s Blog Goes Missing. Technical glitches I can understand. The rudeness from Google rep “nitecruzr” (yeah, really, that’s the name given by the support person) is harder to understand. It’s certainly not helping Google’s reputation.

UPDATE: A longtime reader emails:

I used to work at Google back when originally acquired Blogger.

It doesn’t appear to me that “nitecruzr” is a Google employee. He is identified as a “Top Blog*Spot Contributor”. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net looks like an independent blog that offers “What Blogger Won’t Tell You”.

Later in the support thread, a Google employee named “Brett” appears, politely offers to help Ann, and compliments her blog.

Blogger lets users report spam blogs here:

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=spam

so one possibility is that people who don’t like Ann’s blog launched an astroturf campaign to get her marked as spam.

Believe it or not, sometimes at Google things just plain go wrong, and it’s nothing to do with politics. And by the way, conservatives work there too – I was one of them!

Well, that’s true. Question: If Ann wanted to sue people who falsely reported her blog as a spam-blog, could she make Google cough up their information? I think the answer is yes.