Update: Hempton's blog is now back.

Original post: On Jan. 2, financial blogger extaordinaire John Hempton published a long post with the inflammatory title: "A dark privatised social security story: Astarra, the missing money and how examining a fund manager owned by Joe Biden’s family led to substantial regulatory action in Australia."

I can read it right now in my Google reader, but if you want check it out, you're out of luck.

Suddenly Hempton's blog -- which uses Google's blog platform Blogger -- is labeled as spam and unavailable.

The discovery was made by Felix Salmon, who suspects that someone wants to silence Hempton, and is using Google's report spam feature to silence Hempton's blog.

Whatever the reason is, it's embarrassing that a blog like Hempton's can so easily get snagged, particularly considering the quality of its content and the multitude of inbound links from high profile sites, as Salmon notes.

Hopefully this will be corrected soon, but for an average person, it's not always easy to rectify Google's mistakes.

This is another risk of using Google's cloud -- something we recently discovered when our email was hacked -- and if you're a blogger who publishes content that may make people angry, it's probably worth getting your own domain and hosting setup.