Couple of interesting points from MJR:
Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images
Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com – it has one of those annoying “type the letters from the distorted image” screens (which don’t work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can’t get the letters accepted. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the site or my eyes, but it’s really annoying.
Quite right! Though what is worse is blogger blogs that will only let you comment if you register with blogger. That really is just rubbish.
Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV
25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won’t criticise the actual decision too much, because it’s typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you’re buying Chinese products just because they’re cheaper, you’re part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them – corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don’t like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google?
I think most people’s problem is that it is such hypocritical behaviour – MSN and Yahoo! have had this sort of thing in place with China for ages, and no one batted an eyelid – but perhaps many people – naively – expected better from Google. At least Bill Gates never pretended to be anything other than evil… And fine, it is typical corporation behaviour. But isn’t it nice that at least once people kick up a stink over it?
It’s nice if people *do* something about it as a result of the stink, like stop advertising google for free on their own sites, bookmarking it, and so on.
Why would anyone expect better from google? They’ve been polluting the network with invite spams for years now. If they’re not held to account, they’ll think it’s worth trying to get away with it.
I think they expected better because of the explicit “do no evil” mantra, that Google trumpeted so much at the beginning. Maybe they just seemed like pretty cool guys. Who knows? But plenty of people did hold that opinion, whether they were correct in doing so or not!