GIVE THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES A REST, PLEASE: I mentioned earlier that the Insta-Wife has been locked out of her blog by Blogger. That’s happened to a lot of other people, and it’s given rise to various theories that it’s an anti-left, anti-right, even anti-catholic blog campaign. I think, though, that it’s just a Google glitch, and that people think that blogs like theirs are disproportionately affected because those are the blogs they read. Anyway, I’d advise not getting carried away.

UPDATE: This email from Miriam MIdkiff further undercuts the conspiracy theory approach:

You mentioned in your post that “quite a few other bloggers” are getting locked out of their Blogger accounts. Try hundreds, if not thousands. The Blogger help board is full of frustrated folks like myself.

I am a “genea-blogger”; a genealogy blogger. I had three of my six public blogs (I have eight total on Blogger) get locked out yesterday afternoon. Immediately, I submitted all three for review. My main one (http://ancestories1.blogspot.com) is an award-winning blog that I’ve had for a year and a half on Blogger with nearly 700 posts. It is one of the main genealogy blogs read in the blogosphere. My second one (http://ancestories2.blogspot.com) is a blog with journal prompts to help people write about their own lives for future generations. I don’t blog much there, and after a couple of hours, it was unlocked. The last is a blog I co-author with members of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society (http://ewgs-spokane.blogspot.com). I was hoping to start our media releases this weekend for the upcoming 2009 Washington State Genealogical Society’s statewide conference to be held in Spokane. Currently there are 111 posts at that site.

I’ve heard from a couple of other genea-bloggers who also got locked out very recently. One who got locked several months ago still has a “warning” notice as a potential malicisous site posted when you access it using Mozilla Firefox as a browser, even though she has carefully followed all directions to “scrub” her site which supposedly had malicious software on it.

Many of us are ready to switch to WordPress. I wonder how long it will take before Blogger gets their act together and fixes the problem!

I don’t think that genealogy-bloggers have much of a political slant. [You naive fool! It’s to stop people from looking into Obama’s birth certificate! — ed. Ah, it’s all becoming clear now — a conspiracy so vast . . . .]

ANOTHER UPDATE: More good sense from Randy Neal.