google | Semantically driven

Just as well I’m fairly active in the blogosphere, twittersphere and a few other electronic spheres because I’ve been hearing about people having to move their Feedburner account to a Google one.

I login to Feedburner every now and again and all I had to do one day was sign in with my Google account. I didn’t receive any notification to do anything else and so I didn’t.

But apparently I’m supposed to change my Feedburner address and add a 2 in it in some places.

To say I’m quite annoyed is an understatement. I’m not so annoyed that I have to move to something else that is Google, although they’re taking over Microsoft in the takeover stakes, but I’m annoyed at the fact I haven’t received any information about it.

Surely, an email to all Feedburner customers would have been in order with step-by-step instructions on what to do?

I’ve found something along those lines over here.

So this post is a bit of a rant about what a hassle (and I nearly wrote another word starting with H but this blog is the one place I don’t swear more than bloody) it’s been and to make sure that this appears in the feeds okay, both for me and for you.

I’m now off to make some food to take to the pool. Ta ta.

I run Google Adsense on my other blog – that safarisuit.com one to try and cover the cost of hosting. There’s been some changes with Adsense lately, one of them being that I have to tie that account to a Google account. Fair enough I thought, I’ve got a Google account, I’ll match them up. Except I can’t.

The message I received when trying to combine was not very helpful, ie “A user with the email you specified already exists
Please select a different Google Account login to access this account.”

After a bit of digging I found out that my existing Google account had been banned from running Adsense. I vaguely remember running Adsense on this blog briefly and I took it off. I’m a good girl though and never clicked on my own ads – a no-no in Google’s eyes. This is part of the email they sent me with the news:

Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

Actually I do not understand. What’s a significant risk? I run a personal blog. How’s this a risk? Surely some more information would not go astray, but Google wiggle out of this by saying they cannot let publishers know any information because of their proprietary system.

I’m not alone on this. The exact same thing happened to Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By recently and I’m sure we’re not alone.

Methinks it’s time to look around for advertisers who do not have such ambiguous emails and actually want to help their customers.