Your Blog Is Forever

According to Blogger Help This blog looks abandoned, can I have its address?

Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire.

That's good news - if you're the blog owner. Short of your blog being hacked, what you publish will remain online forever. Of course, your ability to maintain your blog and URL will be subject to your ability to maintain the account that administers the blog. And the future online status of the blog will be subject to how it's published, and its future after you're gone.

That's bad news - if you're the wanna be publisher to the URL, and that URL is not available.

Periodically, we see the question

I want to publish my blog to this URL. There's a blog at that address, but it hasn't been updated in years. Can Blogger give me that address?

And the answer is, of course

No. See the Blogger Help post, or alternatively, the Blogger Contact advice.

And, inevitably, the next question

Can Blogger help me contact the owner?

and that answer is

No. If you see an email address on the blog, use it.

The email address, for many Bloggers, is half of the authentication, to the account used for maintaining the blogs. Would you want Blogger giving out your email address to anybody who asked for it? Nope. So would you expect Blogger to give you somebody else's email address?

Now, along with eternal blog ownership (that you may or may not want) comes blog membership. If you're a member of a blog, but not an administrator, you're going to have to be able to contact an administrator, to remove yourself from the blog.

You can always ignore blog membership publicly, by editing your profile, and selecting "Select blogs to display". If nobody can tell that you're a member, what does it matter?

Maybe in one case, it will matter. If you're invited to migrate your account, and your owned blogs, to The New Blogger, and you're a member of an un migrated team blog, you may see an error message when you try to migrate. Usually, this won't present a real threat. If you are un secure, you can always split your migration.

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