Our first week
Monday, June 25, 2007
It's been pretty cool to work on a project like this blog for a few months, flip a switch to turn it on, and sit back and watch users respond. Now I know how our engineers feel when one of their new products make it to Google Labs.
We've had a great initial response to this blog. Thanks for the friendly blogosphere welcome from BoingBoing, Drew Clark, Paris Lemon, and Search Engine Land, among many others. The MSM-ers at the Mercury News, Washington Post, and PC World also gave shout-outs. Our corporate predecessors in tech policy blogging, Cisco and Verizon, offered some helpful blogging advice (don't try to do too much; don't be afraid to "talk out of school") and reminded us of the hilarious "wicked googley" Jerry Seinfeld AmEx ad. We've heard from some of our critics on policy issues. And the 463 guys promised to send over a casserole (mmm...reminds me of home).
We're also really glad we decided to enable comments on this blog -- and by the looks of things, you are too. You've offered helpful suggestions on improving the site (like labeling posts by issue). You told us you'd like to hear more about our China policies, what we're doing to improve U.S. math and science education, how we protect personal data, how we deal with government censorship requests, our planned acquisition of DoubleClick, and more details about our position on net neutrality. We're listening, and while we may not be able to respond to every comment, we do plan to address your questions and talk about all these issues -- and more -- in future posts.
So, thanks for reading, participating, and giving us a warm welcome. Please continue to share your thoughts on how we can keep advancing Internet-friendly public policy.
Apologies for slightly misusing the comment facility, but I see no contact/support email address...
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that if I subscribe to your Atom feed in IE 7 (I know, I know, I don't have a choice at work) and view the posts in Outlook 2007, they all appear dated 31/12/2006 (even new ones as they are added), but I don't have the same problem with the RSS feed, so I've now switched to that one, but it's clearly an issue to be resolved.
I should add that I don't have this problem with any other feeds that I'm subscribed to, apart from another Google one - the Official Google Webmaster Central blog @ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Please report this to the appropriate support team(s), I can't be the only person experiencing this. Thanks!
Ok, here's my suggestion. I submitted this question before, but got no response, so I'll leave a comment and hope for the best.
ReplyDeleteYou know how you guys have been catching heat for your privacy policy? Well, what I want to know is why you need personally identifiable information at all (let alone 18 to 24 months).
Every search engine optimization task I can think of can be done purely with non-personal information. You don't need to store IPs and you certainly don't have any reason to connect them to someone's Google account.
If I'm wrong, tell me. I've been waiting for a response (or lack of one) to post on my blog.
I feel it would be more useful if you instead wrote a "normative" publication (ie., a wiki) which would continually update your public positions.
ReplyDeleteWith the blog, as soon as a new blog post goes up, the old post gets forgotten.
Congratulations on your public affairs blog. A great effort. Yesterday I launched an new Australian Public Affairs blog (www.p-p.com.au/blog) and have added a link to your blog as Google is quickly becoming one of the most watched and admired leaders in the social networking space. Keep up the good work! I know you are expanding your corporate presence in Australia and good luck in fighting the rise of the web classification zealots.
ReplyDeleteSimon