A dystopian future for bloggers

I recently came across intense and surprising posts about friends-bloggers who got banned by Google for monetizing their site. Their electronic death is a disaster for them. Bloggers write digitally, they exist electronically, but their online creative efforts are real. I think Google should be more careful before shutting down a site. The ones who create a site are real, they are not computer algorithms, so a single algorithm should not be entitled to kill a human's joy! Anyhow, this made me think a little. Google search engine became pretty powerful.

Rumors say that selling/buying links ads (except the Google ads) ruins the natural ecosystem of the blogosphere and that Google penalizes users for doing so (by killing their internet existence). We all know advertisers only care for traffic and trend, but for some reason it indirectly increases their ranking as well and Google fights radically against this. As a blogger-publisher, Google does not warn you and just remove you from their index search as well as decrease drastically your pagerank up to zero. Because it has a almost-monopole on the internet, this resorts pretty much in the site's digital death. Surprisingly, I think Google does not measure the impact this can have on bloggers who actually care for their site/blog.

A useful analogy is to imagine that you worked hard to create a physical business that exists in the real world and that you communicate with some customers with Fedex and other customers with DHL. One day you wake up to find that your physical business has been relocated to Siberia and all because the Fedex guys found out that you use DHL to conduct business with some of your customers. The role of Google is as an intermediary that facilitates business as a service and intermediaries should not be involved with security and policy because of conflict of interest.

I kind of see the point of Google's need for better quality on the blogosphere. However should radical methods like electronic death be tolerated?


Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Graphic new theme for iGoogle

After Boing Boing's Adventure in Lollipopland theme for iGoogle, John Maeda just released a graphic theme. John Maeda offers a series of online gadgets, e.g. a calculator, a clock, an elegant interactive display of his Ten Laws of Simplicity. More recently he launched a new theme on iGoogle. The theme changes based upon the time of day (every 4 hours), and is based upon a series of strokes he drew by hand and a simple algorithmic manipulation thereof. Enjoy!


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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