Google's latest blog mishap points to possibly-neglected services

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the Internet juggernaut that it is, still makes mistakes sometimes. The leading Internet search giant had a rather interesting goof this week when a Google employee posted a blog entry that was meant for her personal blog to one of Google's official company blogs. Normally, this would not be a huge, high-profile deal.

But, as it turns out, when an official Google blog featured two postings about skull-shaped candies, some bloggers started griping about whether the topics were, um, in the right place for Blogger Buzz, the official Google blog that covers Google's blogging services such as www.blogger.com.

Admitted: as PR gaffes go, this is tiny. But with the recent bad publicity on the unreliability of Google's Blogger service, some -- including me -- are beginning to wonder if Google is even paying attention to its little neglected acquisition. Blogger.com -- the world's most popular blogging service acquired by Google a few years back -- suffered an outage last week that kept both Blogger.com and the accompanying Blogspot hosting service offline for two hours.

Unfortunately, this is a lifetime in the universe we know live in, which almost demands 24/7 uptime (although that's an unrealistic expectation, it is what it is). Google later said a "network malfunction" caused the outage. With Google set to deliver its latest quarterly earnings today -- which will be live blogged right here at BloggingStocks -- perhaps an analyst question will come up about Google's "abandoned" children.