If Google thinks this is somehow bad juju, then they are the biggest hypocrites on Earth.

Hey ,it’s great to get out into that real world too, glad to hear things are progressing in that dept. Your wife has a lot of talent!

I’m kinda done with my Google rants (I hope) but enjoyed venting my spleen on them all the same Corporate pretend hippy dratsabs that they are

The links are always appreciated even if I’ve gotten way behind on my reading in the past couple of weeks!

It’s actually been a bit of a relief to forget about some of this stuff for a bit while working on more lucrative offline/online promotion of fine art

Overall I’m unsure if I suffered anything in the recent rounds of blog slapping – I don’t do paid posts but my blog is on the tired old MMO theme, but I was finally given some rank FWIW. I’ve been encouraging the exploration of Google alternatives for various services for a while, but I’m still pleased to receive a fair bit of SE traffic from them and do well in the SERPS for certain chosen phrases.

They are, like any bloated corporation, a faceless tormentor but hey, what ya gonna do eh?

P.S. Good luck with the job hunt….I can imagine how appealing sunnier climes must be around this time of year in northern Europe!

Talk about petty and unecessary. They really could do these things quietly, I’d love to hear an analysis around why silent arrogance is thought to be the better policy.

And none of it good.

In I wrote how Google recently pulled http://girlinshortshorts.blogspot.com/2007/10/smart-cart-shopping.html my Adsense adverts. They did not send an email even telling me what the problem was. Nor will they respond to my inquiry. It is interesting that at least two gogglers spend a considerable amount of time drooling over some of my more titillating posts. Yesterday one of them was at one post which had pictures of Lindsay Lohan and some other celebs in short shorts for 55 minutes–I think we all know what he was doing. But no time to send an email to me.

I have quit gmail (since they admit they crawl it) and minimized use of their search engine. I intend to move the blog from Blogger–but have only been holding back because of the hassle factor.

I consider Google to be more arrogant and dangerous than Microsoft ever was.

~Becky

@Straight Forward – Irrespective of what another player may or may not do, for me the reality is that in this case we have a heavy handed dictat designed to instill maximum FUD at minimum cost with maximum damage to the examples it attacks.

I’m currently of the opinion that as a collective, the blogosphere isn’t some disconnnected sampling of random individuals and that it does have a collective identity that holds real power that could be harnessed to make a difference – what form that difference may take, today, is indeterminable. A million active bloggers alone, potentially, are a formidable force – add their voice to their families and networks of friends and you begin to see how such ideas grow legs.

Media get hold of things, concerned interests spot potentials, ideas take hold, tipping points get tipped, it really doesn’t take so much for an idea to snowball and flourish, especially when the group attacked is sufficiently emotionally charged and motivated. When you look at some of the theorisations around why Google choose to attack these particular practices, then it really isn’t so dificult for a head of steam to coalesce around an idea of say, corporate greed.

Human beings are fickle creatures. What the people bestow the people can take away, no?