A while back, someone from the team had read this story about a savvy blogger.com user who had managed to claim a number of abandoned blogs to make a hefty profit. The basic idea being, abandoned blogs can be easily revived and benefit from incoming links and traffic, the two basic ingredients for ad revenue.

Fact is, the jig is up. Blogger.com soon learned of the spamming technique developed by some and has now enforces a new policy whence domains are never abandoned permanently and always available to their original users.

“Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire. Therefore, we can’t take away somebody’s blog address to give to you. Occasionally people come back to their blogs after long absences, and we want them to be able to find their blog as they left it. If you find some contact information on the blog, you are welcome to deal with the owner directly, to see if they are willing to transfer ownership so you can use that URL. However, we do not give out contact information for the owner of a blog.”

A number of problems remain. Given the fact an overwhelming number of bloggers abandon their sites within months, a greater number of domains will be permanently unavailable to amateur bloggers with a genuine interest in developing a new blogger.com account, thus dooming large blogging communities.