Flagger.

I'm sure that the topic du jour in a lot of circles today will be the "Flag" button that Blogger has added to the Nav Bar. I don't have a Nav Bar, since formerly ad-free blogs don't have to display them. (Yup, I rock that much.) This whole thing would, at first stink of the kind of all-out censorship that MSN applies to blogs hosted there. But come on, this is Blogger we're talking about here, one of the pioneers of that fact that every cool cat and complete moron can publish his or her thoughts on the internet. Are we really gonna believe that Blogger is going to start censoring us? Read on in the article. They are not going to delete anyone's content or account except for those annoying spam blogs. It sounds like the whole point of the new Flag button is to get rid of the spam blogs. Yes, they are not wild about hate speech and the like, but I'm not either, and you know you'd never see actual hate speech here in the first place. Hate speech is sometimes viewed as not protected by the First Amendment anyway, and Blogger still won't delete it automatically. So I don't think this is cause for worry, but rather cause to be happy that Blogger pays attention to the annoying things people use Blogger for and will stop the "Enhanced Bust Made Easy" and "Real Estate for $5" blogs. I for one plan to spent an hour or two today hitting "Next Blog" and flagging every spam blog I can find as a "Thank You" to Blogger for making itself better for us all.