Everyone should have a blog.

The sandbox must be triggered by something suspicious that the website does. Don’t think of Google as a bunch of blubbering idiots (I’m not implying that’s what you said, mind you); they know that some non-spammy sites will be thrown into the sandbox, so they’ve obviously taken precautions to try and lower that number while still catching as many spammy sites as possible.

The thing is: most people don’t like blogs; in fact, they despise them. Blogs like this aren’t really what I consider ‘blogs’ (they’re basically article sites with short and to-the-point articles in blog form) and I feel that they should be renamed to something else.
Your concept of the blogspace for locating people sounds like an excellent idea for this sort of situation, though.