Google Plus Comments on Blogspot

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Revision as of 23:35, 28 June 2019 by Tech234a (talk | contribs)
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Google Plus Comments on Blogspot
Google Plus Comments on Blogspot logo
URL https://plus.google.com/, https://www.blogger.com/
Status Offline
Archiving status Saved! (Approximately 181,565 blogs) Archive Link, Find a Blog's Comments
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
Project lead Tech234a, Afrmtbl, Jopik, and glmdgrielson from the Internet Trash Heap Discord server

History

As part of Google's efforts to integrate Google+ with a variety of its services, a feature was made available to allow blogs hosted on Google's blogging platform known as Blogger/Blogspot to use a Google+-based commenting system rather than the previous commenting system that offered a variety of authentication methods. Google+-based comments were never made a mandatory feature, but many blogs opted-in to using them.

Shutdown Information

As part of the Google+ shutdown, Google announced on 2019-01-30 that Google+ comments would be removed from Blogger blogs on 2019-02-04. Blogs were encouraged to revert back to the previous commenting system.

Beginning on 2019-02-04 and through the following several weeks, Google+ comments were gradually removed from Blogger blogs, however, because the Google+ comments were implemented as an embedded comments widget, the data remained accessible via a simple URL until the Google+ API shutdown on 2019-03-07. The API shutdown occurred between approximately 18:27 UTC and 20:27 UTC on 2019-03-07.

Archive Information

Tech234a, Afrmtbl, Jopik, and glmdgrielson from the Internet Trash Heap Discord server worked together to lead the archiving project for Google+ comments on Blogspot blogs. Comments were archived between 2019-02-26 and 2019-03-07. Blog URLs were discovered using the Common Crawl's CDX API and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine CDX API. In some cases, legacy comments that appeared in Google+ comment widgets were also archived. An archive was posted in JSON format on the Internet Archive with data from approximately 181,565 blogs that had Google+ comments associated with them. In addition, a searchable archive of this data was created and posted to the Internet Archive. The JSON schema is available on the archive's Internet Archive page.

Future

A possible future project would be to allow users to re-import Google+ comments for inclusion with legacy comments on their blogs. This would be possible by exporting the blog as XML, adding the additional comments to the XML file, and re-importing the blog's XML file. This can be done manually or via one of Google's OAuth APIs.