At this stage, it seems to me that Google have arbitrarily changed our assigned domain name without any form of notification or warning. Even though there is a redirect on, I'm not sure if it is also the cause of several issues I've experienced with some browser utilities and have yet to see the impact on our Stat Counter tools. A quick look and it seems Alexa has picked up the change, with our page rank going from 322,000 or so to 16 million, supposedly as it is detecting a new blog.
Has anyone else noticed their NZ blogger domains changing?
Update: A "planned" event to make it easier to allow different countries to prevent blog sites from publishing content in their country. Read the details here: Why does my blog redirect to a country specific URL?
If you want to preserve your blog address you need to add a "no country redirect" (/ncr) following the blog address, thus: nzconservative.blogspot.com/ncr where ever you create links or leave your blog URL. Not sure of the advantages this would provide, unless your country decides to block the country specific blog sites. Update: According to Google: "Blog owners should not see any visible differences to their blog other than the URL redirecting to a ccTLD. URLs of custom domains will be unaffected."
Hah! Not so, it looks like it's going to play havoc with our (Alexa) site rankings. I'll do a post to explain how later.
Update: Google have rolled back the changes. More here: The post I said I'd do later.