Letter from the Editor

Dear UGLYbrandNEWS readers (and Blogger Staff):

This morning I received an e-mail which I almost deleted as spam:

Hello,

Your blog at: http://uglybrandnews.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at [snip]

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: [snip]

UGLYbrandNEWS was created by me for the enjoyment of its readers around the world. I am a real person, and the items I post are meant to be enjoyed by people, real or otherwise.

I look forward to continuing to post beautiful and ugly items here on UGLYbrandNEWS.com for years to come.

Any comment that you post here, and any e-mail that you write to me will be answered personally by me, a person and not a program.

(At least, last I checked, I am still a person. Might be fun to be a bot)

To prove that I am a real person, here is a link to drawings that I drew at Google I/O at the end of May 2009:

http://bit.ly/GoogleIOdrawingsDNSF

And to the person at the excellent free blogging platform Blogger who reviews this site, to prove that I am a real person, I would be happy to come to your office to draw your portrait -- in person -- and post it here as a kind of reverse CAPTCHA.

Naturally, I would tag your portrait with the keyword "beautiful".

Kind Regards,

Your Editor,

David Newman