Google's blogging woes continue

On Tuesday, two postings about skull-shaped candies appeared on Blogger Buzz, the official blog of this Google blog publishing service. Their topic and informal tone immediately led readers to wonder about their legitimacy.

Google removed the postings quickly after they were published, a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail on Wednesday. The employee who published the postings by mistake is a regular contributor to Blogger Buzz, the spokeswoman wrote.

Last week, Blogger suffered an outage that kept both Blogger.com and the Blogspot hosting service offline for two hours. That kept the many official Google blogs which are hosted on the Blogger platform offline. Google later said a "network malfunction" caused the outage.

Earlier this month, a hacker broke into Google's main official blog, which is hosted on Blogger, and posted a false message saying that the company had decided to cancel a joint click-to-call advertising project with eBay Inc.

Google patched the hole and removed the posting from the so-called Google Blog, but the intruder's message was widely noticed and triggered significant speculation and confusion among Google observers.

In March, Google staffers deleted the Google Blog by mistake and someone unaffiliated with the company briefly took control of the Web address.

Like all companies that store sensitive data from consumers and organizations, Google is held to a high standard when it comes to mistakes like these ones. Displays of carelessness or security vulnerabilities that affect Google's services undermine users' trust, critics say.