Here are the columns and news stories for the week of Sept. 13 to 17, as reported by the Search Engine Watch team of experts.

The MEGA List of Free and Paid SEO Tools the Professionals Use by Garry Przyklenk
Rankings, link analysis, trends, keyword research, metrics, and beyond -- we've compiled a list of must-have free/paid tools, toolbars, and browser plug-ins for all SEO professionals.

7 Reasons Why Google Instant Makes SEO Dead-on Relevant by Jonathan Allen
Steve Rubel kicked off a furore among the SEO community during the Google Instant launch event on Wednesday last week, which most people were following on Youtube...

SEM Basics

10 Top Online Travel Marketing Tips by Kevin Gibbons
Compete and drive sales in the travel sector using this advice on paid search budget planning, user-generated content, search engine optimization, and much more.

Search Engine Optimization

Don't Let Small Disconnects Lead to SEO Disaster by Josh McCoy
When SEOs and webmasters aren't on the same page, it can lead to listings dropping off search engine result pages. Here's how to avoid three common SEO blunders.

Search Advertising

Unleash Your Full PPC Potential by Leveraging Google AdWords' Match Types by John Lee
Exact match, phrase match, and broad match working together: build a winning PPC team.

Diagnosing the Impact of Optimization on Your Quality Score by Jason Tabeling
These two Google tools can help you understand and track your quality score, as well as the effect of your paid search campaign optimizations.

5 Things to Try to With Google AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) by Joseph Kerschbaum
We review the different types of experiments that can be launched using ACE, and where the feature needs improvement.

Goodbye, Yahoo: 4 Things I'll Miss About Panama by Jeremy Hull
A wish list of Yahoo Panama features Google and/or Microsoft should integrate into their paid search platforms to make life easier for search marketers.

Social Media Marketing

Search and Social: Are You Missing Out? by Kaila Strong
Examining social media's impact on search, and how best to integrate a bit of social into your search engine marketing (or search into your social media marketing).

Visualizing the Social CRM Process by Jacob Morgan
This simple six-step process will help you create a social customer relationship management strategy for your organization.

Social Search Circles -- Nobody Knows the Pages I've Seen by Mark Drummond
All search is really social search. How subtracting "social" from "social search" prevents us from finding the pages we really want to track down.

SEM Agency Issues

Apple iAd -- A Summary for Search Marketers by Marc Poirier
Can iAds succeed? That's the big question. Everything SEMs need to know about iAds, including how they differ from IAB ads, the iAd network, targeting, metrics, how much a typical campaign costs, PPC vs. CPM, and revenue sharing.

International Search

Top Tips for Search Engine Marketing in Germany, Part 1 by Michael Bonfils
These five tips, and a lot of patience, will help your SEM/SEO efforts in the difficult German market.

The Search Industry

Navigational Search: Turn Right at the Big Chicken by Eli Goodman
When searchers are in unfamiliar territory, search phrases that double as a website address are great navigation tools. An enormous portion of searches involve web addresses, so make sure you create a navigational search strategy.

More News

New Microsoft Paid Search Features & More Search News

New Yahoo SERP, Mail, Twitter/Facebook Integration: A Fall Preview

Bing Search in IE9; Skyhook Sues Google; Latest comScore Search/Mobile Stats & More Search News

Twitter Releases Two Pane Web Interface

Google Social 'Layers', Google Fires Teen Stalker, Facebook/Microsoft Search Deal Rumor & More Search News

All B2B Marketers Are Boring? - SES Hong Kong

Bing No. 2 Search Engine, the Googleopoly, Link Building Study & More Search News

Google Buys Quicksee, YouTube Tests Live Streaming, Social Usurps Search & more - A Weekend Roundup

Last week was all about being caught in the sniper's crosshairs. This time we want songs that feature a set up and a punchline

It's OK, you can put the gun down now. Unscrew the telescopic sight. Put your garrotte wire back with the cheese. Last week's exploration of traumatic moments in history, with an added tour of the darkest recesses of the human psyche, is now at an end. If you wish to continue the research in your spare time, please stay safe.

Next, nos 1 – 10 with a bullet (aka the A-list, which you can read about here: Loudon Wainwright III – No John; Marvin Gaye – Abraham, Martin and John; Peter Gabriel – Family Snapshot; Paul Simon – The Late Great Johnny Ace; Charlie Poole – White House Blues; Tinariwen – Mamo Dayak, Mahalia Jackson – In the Summer of His Years; Black Star – Definition; Awadi – J'Accuse; Phil Ochs – Crucifixion.

The B-list

Pharoahe Monch – Mayor

I presume the imagined target is Rudy Giuliani, hardly a favourite of the NYC hip-hop community. The tune may be nothing to write home about, but the conceit is original: "If I'm gonna die at least I shot the mayor!"

Jerry Lee Lewis – Lincoln Limousine

Another JFK tribute that was perhaps superseded by others in the A-list, but it has a directness and a simplicity that makes it distinctly touching.

Stone Roses – Elizabeth My Dear

So short it's almost a vignette or, to be more accurate, a nursery rhyme. To the tune of Scarborough Fair, Her Maj gets one from a silenced revolver. And that isn't innuendo.

Bill Drummond – Julian Cope is Dead

This tickled my funny bone (I may not be right in the head), both in its choice of subject matter and its form; a folk ballad that might be more suited to tales of derring do than the unlamented passing of a rock iconoclast.

Ravi Shankar – Raga Mohan Kauns

An instrumental tribute to Gandhi that may or may not be anything to do with his death, but is certainly beguiling.

Spencer Davis Group – Waltz for Lumumba

An instrumental tribute to Patrice Lumumba that may or may not be anything to do with his death, but is certainly funky.

The Fall – Hey Luciani!

I struggle to understand the Fall sometimes. Their rough, blustering music, Mark E Smith's elliptical lyrics. But this certainly fits the rubric while also discussing Vatican politics, so it deserves inclusion.

George Perkins – Crying in the Streets

Was perhaps too similar (both in style and structure) to Abraham Martin and John to make the A-list, but this is a stirring song that also remains resolutely danceable.

The Isley Brothers – Ohio

Not an assassination, but certainly a cracking tune that swells and recedes across its nine minutes in a dramatic, theatrical style that I find compelling.

Rage Against the Machine – Wake Up

Kashmir-referencing, conspiracy-theorising, rabble-rousing power rock. And why not?

This week, then. Some of you may remember that I have been (and still am, in fact) at the Edinburgh festival watching more standup than is really advisable. I have, therefore, jokes on the brain. And that's the qualifying criteria for this week's topic. Not "funny" (we had that topic many moons ago), but containing a set up and a punchline. For those unclear as to what that constitutes, here's an example:

A horse walks into a bar.

Ouch, says the horse, I must use the door next time.

Yes, I just made that up.

The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill, the Collabo.

The rulebook:

DO post your nominations before midday on Monday if you wish them to be considered.

DO post justifications of your choices wherever possible.

DO NOT post more than one-third of the lyrics of any song.

DO NOT dump lists of nominations – if you must post more than two or three at once, please attempt to justify your choices.

Finally, let this young fellow be our guiding light.

Fiction
1	DEAD IN THE FAMILY (Ace, $25.95) By Charlaine Harris. This 10th Sookie Stackhouse tale delves into family dynamics and romantic liaisons.	1
2	THE 9TH JUDGMENT (Little, Brown, $27.99) By James Patterson. The Women's Murder Club works to find the link between seemingly isolated crimes.	2
3	INNOCENT (Grand Central, $27.99) By Scott Turow. Rusty Savitch is a murder suspect once more in this "Presumed Innocent" sequel.	1
4	DELIVER US FROM EVIL (Grand Central, $27.99) By David Baldacci. Covert operative Shaw returns to thwart a Ukrainian trading in nuclear arms and slavery.	3
5	THE HELP (Amy Einhorn, $24.95) By Kathryn Stockett. A frank chronicle of the lives of several black maids working in a town in 1960s Miss.	43
6	THE DOUBLE COMFORT SAFARI CLUB (Pantheon, $24.95). By Alexander McCall Smith. The new No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency tale.	3
7	THE SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE (Simon & Schuster, $25.99). By Mary Higgins Clark. A tale of money, murder and a quest for beatification.	4
8	ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA (Harper, $26.99) By Isabel Allende. A young slave, her master and their shared fates in the colony that would become Haiti.	1
9	HANNAH'S LIST (Mira, $24.95) By Debbie Macomber. A recent widower is left suggestions for a new mate in a note from his late wife.	2
10	THIS BODY OF DEATH (Harper, $28.99) By Elizabeth George. A new suspense tale featuring the astute, aristocratic Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley.	3
Nonfiction/General
1	SPOKEN FROM THE HEART (Scribner, $30) By Laura Bush. The former first lady's reflections on eight years in the White House and what came before.	1
2	ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (Threshold Editions, $16.99). By Jack E. Levin & Mark R. Levin. An illustrated edition of a seminal document.	1
3	THE BIG SHORT: INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE (Norton, $27.95). By Michael Lewis The murky world of financial derivatives.	8
4	OPRAH: A BIOGRAPHY (Crown, $30) By Kitty Kelley. The celebrity biographer's unauthorized look at the life of the media mogul and talk show host.	4
5	THE BLUEPRINT: OBAMA'S PLAN TO SUBVERT THE CONSTITUTION AND BUILD AN IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY (Lyons, $22.95). By Ken Blackwell & Ken Klukowski	2
6	THE LAST STAND: CUSTER, SITTING BULL, AND THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIG HORN (Viking, $30) By Nathaniel Philbrick. Clarifying a bit of history.	1
7	THIS TIME TOGETHER: LAUGHTER AND REFLECTION (Harmony, $25). By Carol Burnett. The award-winning comedian and actress looks back.	4
8	CHELSEA CHELSEA BANG BANG (Grand Central, $25.99). By Chelsea Handler A new batch of essays from the comedian.	9
9	CITIZEN YOU: DOING YOUR PART TO CHANGE THE WORLD (Crown, $24). By Jonathan Tisch with Karl Weber. Tips from the successful entrepreneur.	1
10	THE PIONEER WOMAN COOKS: RECIPES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL COUNTRY GIRL (Morrow, $27.50) By Ree Drummond. From the big city to cattle ranch.	1

On Monday, Google made good on its promise to stop censorship of its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, by rerouting viewers to its unfettered Hong Kong site. According to the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, the move was “a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and...

"8 Predictions for Health Care" The Atlantic

"Health Care Reform and the Radicalization of Betsy and Robby" The Huffington Post

"Exempted From Obamacare: Senior Staff Who Wrote the Bill" The New Ledger

"Y Combinator presents 26 new startups" VentureBeat

"Chinese netizens' open letter to the Chinese Government and Google" RConversation

"Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift" NYTimes

"An Interview with David Drummond of Google" The Atlantic

"China's Entrepreneurs: Focusing on the Human Capital Behind the Venture Capital" Knowledge@Wharton

"'Keep the Heritage of the Brand Intact': Tommy Hilfiger on Weathering the Ups and Downs of Retail Fashion" Knowledge@Wharton

"Inviting the Rise of the Entrepreneurial Journalist
True/Slant is modeling the newsroom of the future by empowering contributors to build their own digital brands—and by changing the role of the editor." Nieman Reports

Apple's profit share, Amazon's price squash, 10 thin laptops, OU games courses, USB design delight, Palm's (nonexistent?) value, the tablet, and big data breaches

Photo by cogdogblog on Flickr; CC-BY licensed

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team. Want to send a link our way? Tag it with "guardiantech" on delicious.com and we'll take a look.

Apple Is In The Middle Of The Pack On Revenue, But Crushing On Operating Profit >> BusinessInsider
Your handy chart showing how Apple has just 7% of the PC market's revenue, but 35% of its operating profit.

An Interview with David Drummond of Google - the Atlantic
Comments from Google's chief legal officer and author of yesterday's Official Google Blog post about the company's new policies in China.

Price Parity - Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.co.uk has told its marketplace suppliers that "the item price and total price (total amount payable, excluding taxes) of each product a seller offers on Amazon.co.uk must generally be the same or lower than on the seller's other non-physical sales channels". In sum, no undercutting Amazon online. Sellers probably won't like this, but Amazon.co.uk owns the marketplace...

The 10 Thinnest and Lightest Laptops on The Planet - gadgetswow.com
Doesn't include netbooks, some less common brands such as MSI's X340 Slim or even the well-known Toshiba Portege range (weight starts at under 1kg) but it's a start....

Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities >> Open University
Feel like getting into games design? Sign up.

Turn one USB port into as many as you like >> Gonglue Jiang
An elegant solution, and a worthy design winner, though people have pointed out that you'd only be able to get up to 127 of these (only 127 USB devices on a port) and that the voltage wouldn't power more than 5. Even so, neat.

Who will buy Palm? >> Monday Note
Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple Mac head, founder of Be. Inc: "in one day, this past Friday March 19th, Palm shares collapsed, -29% in one Nasdaq session, closing at $4. The obvious question is why [did it fall]? But a second query immediately comes up: why $4, why not zero?"

How the Tablet Will Change the World >>Wired Magazine
Steven Levy suggests that the iPad is going to make us use micropayments... though then links that to credit cards. Hmm. It's more interesting on how Microsoft's tablet forms haven't broken through. At all.

The 15 Most Massive Data Breaches in History
A great list not dominated by UK government, though there is room for the 25 Million Child Benefit Records Missing From HM Revenue and Customs

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

As the latest phase of the epic showdown between China and Google headed into its third day, it became increasingly clear that neither party is planning to back down -- and in fact, it now looks like Beijing is looking to punish the search company for its insouciance.

For its part, Google seems committed to standing on principle. James Fallows has a good interview with David Drummond, the Google vice president whose been out front on the company's move of its search portal from mainland China to Hong Kong. And he manages to clear up a mystery: What's the connection between the hack attack and Google's decision not to censor search results any more?

This attack, which was from China ... was almost singularly focused on getting into Gmail accounts specifically of human rights activists, inside China or outside. They tried to do that through Google systems that thwarted them. On top of that, there were separate attacks, many of them, on individual Gmail users who were political activists inside and outside China. There were political aspects to this hacking attacks that were quite unusual.

?That was distasteful to us. It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling internet search results or trying to surveil activists. It is all part of the same repressive program, from our point of view. We felt that we were being part of that. 

That was the direct connection with the hacking incident. It wasn't in isolation. Since the Beijing Olympics, our experience in China has gotten worse. Although we have gained market share, it has become more and more difficult for us to operate there. Particularly when it comes to censorship. We have had to censor more. More and more pressure has been put on us. It has gotten appreciably worse -- and not just for us, for other internet companies too.

Rebecca MacKinnon corroborates that  account in comments originally intended as congressional testimony. Money quote:

China is pioneering a new kind of Internet-age authoritarianism. It is demonstrating how a non-democratic government can stay in power while simultaneously expanding domestic Internet and mobile phone use. 

On the business front, the New York Times reports that Google's partners are swiftly moving to distance themselves from this move (the paper also quotes a number of pro-China scholars who profess confusion at the company's stance, though another Times story shows more balance).

China's leaders may think Google is emerging the loser here, and the company's stock has stagnated over the last few months as investors pondered the impact. "From an industry standpoint, however, Google's exit will leave more room for international and domestic competitors to tap into the potential of a market with the largest online population," one China Daily article today reads. "Without Google access to pornographic and subversive content, China's cyber space will continue to grow in a cleaner and more peaceful environment." Uh-huh.

Ultimately, this incident could end up hurting China far more than it does Google -- exposing the country's claims of increased openness as hollow, scaring away potential investors, and taking away a valuable source of innovation and healthy competition.

But it's not just China that could end up damaged. We're definitely seeing a tipping point here in the United States, with U.S.-China relations heading into dangerous territory. When you've got Paul Krugman calling for retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods, something is definitely afoot.

A new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute claims that China's currency policies sucked away 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2008. That strikes me as highly dubious, but many in Washington will seize upon the figure as pressure on the Obama administration to label China a "currency manipulator" mounts. And I think the Google fracas plays into that.

The scary thing is, we all lose if a trade war breaks out. The price of Chinese imports will go up around the world. U.S. consumers will pay more for their iPhones. And China might retaliate, making everyone poorer.

I'm sure Obama's economic team -- committed free traders like White House advisor Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner --  knows all this, and is counseling calm. But sometimes the political guys win.

El Gobierno chino acusó a Google de haber "violado su promesa escrita" y afirmó que "es totalmente incorrecto" que detenga la censura a las búsquedas de internet en chino, informó hoy un portavoz de la Oficina de Información del Consejo de Estado.

El portavoz respondió así al anuncio que ayer hizo el gigante informático en el que anunció que deja de censurar sus búsquedas en China y redirige a los internautas a su portal de Hong Kong. Desde ayer los visitantes del portal en China google.cn son redirigidos al de Hong Kong google.com.hk.

Con ello, la compañía pretende saltarse las restricciones de censura impuestas por el gobierno del gigante asiático, que es el mayor mercado de Internet, con 384 millones de usuarios.

"Google violó la promesa escrita que hizo cuando entró en el mercado chino al detener el filtro de su servicio de búsqueda", subrayó el funcionario. Añadió, además, que Google está culpando a China al insinuar supuestos ataques de 'hackers'".

La empresa, que canaliza más del 30 por ciento de las búsquedas en Internet del país, aceptó hace cuatro años aplicar un filtro para operar dentro de China, lo que le ganó las críticas de las organizaciones de defensa de los derechos humanos.

El punto de inflexión ocurrió en enero, cuando la compañía reveló haber sido víctima de un ataque por parte de piratas informáticos. Durante la investigación de ese incidente se descubrió que alguien había intervenido los correos electrónicos de defensores de los derechos humanos en China.

"Esto es totalmente incorrecto. Nosotros estamos absolutamente en contra de la politización de los temas comerciales y expresamos nuestro descontento e indignación hacia Google por sus irracionales acusaciones y conductas", agrego el portavoz.

Según dijo en el blog oficial de Google David Drummond, director de su departamento legal, "la medida es resultado del fracaso de las negociaciones con el gobierno para operar una página de internet no sujeta a la censura, a lo cual las autoridades se negaron".

Por su parte, el funcionario de la Oficina de Información de China señaló que "los departamentos relevantes del gobierno chino hablaron dos veces con Google, a petición de ellos, el 29 de enero y el 25 de febrero para escuchar las intenciones reales de la compañía y para demostrar la sinceridad del gobierno".

"Nosotros dimos explicaciones pacientes y meticulosas a las preguntas de Google (en las conversaciones)... y le dijimos que aún se daba la bienvenida a su operación y desarrollo en China si estaba dispuesta a apegarse a las leyes chinas", sentenció.

Además, el funcionario apuntó que "las compañías extranjeras deben cumplir la ley y regulaciones chinas cuando operan en el país asiático".

La estratagema de Google para esquivar la censura china ha obtenido una respuesta. Si ayer el buscador anunciaba que las visitas que recibiese desde el país asiático sería redireccionadas a su web en Hong Kong (una de las dos regiones chinas que mantiene su propio sistema jurídico), hoy el Gobieno chino, según informa The New York Times, ha decidido bloquear el acceso a las búsquedas en Google y la mayoría de los ciudadanos no pueden acceder a los resultados sin que pasen por la censura.

Así, cualquier internauta que acceda este martes a google.cn (la dirección del buscador en China), tras ser redireccionado a la web en Hong Kong, no podrá encontrar resultados sobre la "matanza de Tiananmen" o el "conflicto del Tíbet".

El departamento de Internet de la Oficina de Información del Consejo de Estado chino denuncia que Google ha violado su contrato y está "totalmente equivocado" por desviar a los usuarios a su web de Hong Kong para evitar la censura.

Un portavoz de dicha oficina ha subrayado en declaraciones a la agencia oficial Xinhua, que "Google ha violado el compromiso escrito firmado cuando entró en el mercado chino al frenar el filtro de su servicio de búsqueda y culpar a China insinuando supuestos ataques de 'hackers'".

Esta denuncia, ha añadido, "es completamente falsa". "Estamos opuestos inflexiblemente a la politización de asuntos comerciales, y expresamos nuestro descontento e indignación con Google por sus acusaciones y conductas poco razonables", ha rematado el portavoz.

El gigante informático estadounidense Google canceló este lunes los servicios de su servidor en China ('google.cn') para remitir a los usuarios a la página del buscador en Hong Kong ('google.com.hk'), en un movimiento que trataba de salvar la censura de Pekín tras los recientes desencuentros. "Creemos que esta nueva estrategia para proporcionar búsquedas sin censura en chino simplificado a través de google.com.hk es una solución razonable", afirmaba el director legal de la empresa, David Drummond, este lunes en el blog de la compañía.

La decisión ha provocado que a primera hora de la mañana de hoy varios transeúntes colocaran flores o chocolates sobre el gran cartel metálico de Google en el edificio de la compañía en Beijing.

Los antecedentes

Google llevaba utilizando un filtro en sus búsquedas desde hace cuatro años como condición para poder estar en el mercado chino, el mayor del mundo con casi 400 millones de internautas, y que le había valido muchas críticas de ONGs pro derechos humanos, que la acusaban de plegarse a la censura de un país sin libertad de expresión como China.

Mientras en Occidente la empresa estadounidense suele concentrarcuotas de hasta el 75 por ciento de las búsquedas totales en la red, en China -como ocurre en otros mercados asiáticos- Google es menos popular, y en el gigante asiático sólo tiene un 30 por ciento del mercado local, dominado por la local Baidu (60 por ciento).

El punto de inflexión entre Google y China se inició en enero, cuando la compañía reveló haber sido víctima de un ataque por parte de piratas informáticos.

Durante la investigación de ese incidente se descubrió que alguien había intervenido los correos electrónicos de activistas de derechos humanos en China, ante lo cual Google anunció que dejaría de filtrar sus búsquedas en el país, aunque ello implicara el fin de su presencia en la tercera economía mundial.

Internet giant makes bold move after two-month standoff over web censorship with Beijing

As it happened: Google shuts down Chinese search engine

World reaction: Search engine's stand against censorship welcomed by campaigners

Google shut down its search service on the Chinese mainland last night after a two-month standoff with Beijing over online freedom and an alleged intrusion by hackers.

Chinese authorities attacked the internet giant as "totally wrong" for its decision to shift the Chinese-language site to Hong Kong.

The move allowed the US firm to stop self-censoring the service, although the government's filtering system would still prevent mainland users from seeing the results of many sensitive searches.

Google shocked the industry when it announced in January that it would end four years of self-censorship in China, acknowledging it might mean withdrawal.

Supporters left flowers, chocolate and other gifts outside the firm's Beijing headquarters this morning. But while the company can boast a devoted following, it has only around one-third of the market by revenue, and a lower ratio of users.

The furore highlighted the challenges of doing business in China for western companies and drew a line under the era of unfettered optimism about the internet's ability to change the country.

The company now believes it has found a legal way out, and said it intended to maintain its research, development and advertising sales business in China – which has the world's largest internet population, of almost 400 million. But it acknowledged that authorities could block the Chinese search service.

In an unusually swift response, an unnamed official at the state council information office – one of the bodies overseeing internet controls – said Google was "totally wrong" and had "violated its written promise", in remarks carried by the official news agency, Xinhua.

Google.cn now redirects visitors to google.com.hk – where they are greeted by a message reading: "Welcome to Google search in China's new home."

The Chinese government's internet filtering system, "the great firewall", prevented results being returned when searches were conducted using sensitive words and phrases such as "Tiananmen Square 1989" on google.com.hk; the internet connection was reset.

Although Hong Kong is part of China, the "one country, two systems" framework means it operates under different laws. Google already had a search service there using the territory's traditional characters, but has added a simplified Chinese service for mainland users.

"We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced," said the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond. "We hope the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are aware that it could at any time block access."

Acknowledging concerns about the repercussions of angering authorities, Drummond said the decisions had been "driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and ... none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them."

Isaac Mao, a well-known blogger, said he believed more information would be available via google.com.hk than on google.cn even given the government's filtering.

Michael Anti, another prominent blogger, argued: "The biggest difference is that netizens will notice the existence of censorship. Because it was self-censorship before, they weren't aware of it. But now it is the great firewall, people can see what has happened."

He said Google's move showed that the Chinese were not second-class internet users, adding: "Like all, we deserve an uncensored internet."

But Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project, at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that Google would find it hard to continue doing business in China.

Google said in January that its decision to stop censoring followed a cyber attack, originating from China, that it believed was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists as well as intellectual property. Its statement also cited growing internet censorship.

Beijing argues that most countries control internet content and has denied any connection to cyber attacks.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, told the New York Times that he believed efforts by governments such as China to control online speech were likely to fail, adding: "I think that in the long term, they are going to have to open."

"The story’s not over yet," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the New York Times in a brief interview after his company redirected Chinese Internet users from Google.cn to a Web address in Hong Kong today. “There was a sense that Hong Kong was the right step."

Maybe this decision was taken with the full or tacit consent of the Chinese Communist Party. If so, nobody told China's State Council Information Office, which issued the following angry  statement on Google's move:

"Foreign companies operating in China must abide by Chinese laws. Google has violated the written promise it made on entering the Chinese market. It is totally wrong in halting (censorship) filtering of its search provider and also making aspersions and accusations towards China about hacking attacks. We firmly oppose politicising commercial issues, and express our dissatisfaction and anger at Google Inc's unreasonable accusations and practices."

China's state news agency, Xinhua, also chimes in to report the results of an online poll showing that most Chinese Internet users "don't care" if Google leaves China. Another Xinhua article says that Google is politicizing itself, and that "one company's ambition to change China's Internet rules and legal system will only prove to be ridiculous." A third article informs us that none of this will affect China's ability to attract foreign businesses.

Rebecca MacKinnon comments:

The Chinese government is reacting in a knee-jerk and counterproductive manner which implies that they think they should have jurisdiction over websites hosted on computer servers physically beyond their borders, and which implies disrespect for the Hong Kong Basic Law to which the CCP made a clear commitment.

(For more on the technical issues, see Andrew Lih's handy primer on the difference between the Chinese and Hong Kong Internets.)

MacKinnon also points to an in-depth interview she did with Google senior vice president David Drummond, who provides some interesting background on the company's views of China. His remarks directly contradicts the spin coming from the Chinese government, which claims it is steadily opening the Internet, but at a pace of its on choosing. "What’s clear is that the environment in which we were operating in terms of an open internet was not improving in China," Drummond said.

There are a couple ways this thing could go now. China could block the Hong Kong site altogether, which so far it doesn't appear to be doing. Or it could leave it be and block results on a case-by-case basis.

A more troubling possibility is that China uses this incident to crack down on Hong Kong's freedoms. So far, fears that Beijing would trample all over the rights Hong Kong residents had enjoyed before the 1997 handover proved largely unfounded. But that was then. What's to stop China from deciding that it won't honor its agreements? You'd have to think some in Hong Kong are worrying about the possibility now.

No dia 13 de janeiro, anunciamos neste blog que o Google e mais de 20 outras empresas norte-americanas foram vítimas de um ataque cibernético originado na China. Durante nossa investigação, descobrimos evidências de que a conta do Gmail de dezenas de ativistas de direitos humanos relacionados à China eram regularmente acessadas por terceiros, provavelmente por fraudes de phishing ou malware instalados nos computadores dos usuários. Também deixamos claro que esses ataques e a vigilância que eles revelaram, além de tentativas de limitar a liberdade de expressão na Web, com o bloqueio permanente de sites como Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs e Blogger, levaram-nos a concluir que não podíamos mais continuar a censurar nossos resultados no domínio Google.cn.

Portanto, a partir de hoje deixamos de censurar nossos serviços de Pesquisa do Google, Google Notícias e Google Imagens no Google.cn. Os usuários que visitarem o Google.cn serão redirecionados para o Google.com.hk, em que oferecemos pesquisa sem censura em chinês simplificado, especialmente para usuários da China continental por meio de nossos servidores em Hong Kong. Os usuários de Hong Kong continuam a receber o serviço existente sem censura em chinês tradicional, também pelo endereço Google.com.hk. Devido ao aumento da demanda em nossos servidores em Hong Kong e da natureza complicada dessas mudanças, os usuários poderão enfrentar lentidões ou encontrar alguns serviços indisponíveis enquanto realizamos a troca.

Encontrar uma maneira de cumprir a nossa promessa de impedir a pesquisa censurada no Google.cn foi difícil. Queremos que nossos serviços sejam acessíveis para o maior número possível de pessoas no mundo. Isso inclui os usuários na China continental, ainda que o governo chinês tenha deixado claro durante nossas negociações que a autocensura é um requisito legal inegociável. Acreditamos que esta nova abordagem, oferecendo pesquisa sem censura em chinês simplificado a partir do Google.com.hk, seja uma solução prática para os desafios que enfrentamos. Trata-se de uma saída completamente legal que vai aumentar consideravelmente o acesso à informação para a população chinesa. Esperamos que o governo chinês respeite nossa decisão, ainda que tenhamos plena consciência de que eles podem bloquear o acesso a nossos serviços a qualquer momento. Portanto, vamos monitorar atentamente problemas de acesso e criamos esta nova página da web (site parcialmente em inglês), que será atualizada regularmente todos os dias para que o mundo inteiro saiba que serviços do Google estão disponíveis na China.

Quanto aos outros negócios do Google, desejamos continuar o trabalho de pesquisa e desenvolvimento na China, além de manter uma presença de vendas no país, mas o tamanho dessa equipe vai depender do acesso dos chineses do continente ao endereço Google.com.hk. Por fim, queremos deixar claro que todas essas decisões foram tomadas e implementadas por nossos executivos nos Estados Unidos e que nenhum dos nossos funcionários na China podem, ou devem, ser responsabilizados por elas. Apesar de toda a incerteza e das dificuldades que enfrentamos desde o anúncio em janeiro, nossos funcionários na China se concentraram apenas em atender nossos usuários e clientes chineses. Estamos muito orgulhosos de cada um deles.

Postado por: David Drummond, Vice-presidente sênior, desenvolvimento corporativo e advogado-chefe


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A China anunciou nesta terça-feira (23/3) que o Google "violou sua promessa escrita" e se engana "por completo" ao deixar de censurar seu motor de buscas chinês Google.cn.

O comentário foi feito por um funcionário encarregado da internet no gabinete de informação do Conselho de Estado, segundo a agência de notícias estatal chinesa Xinhua.

"O Google violou a promessa escrita que assinou quando entrou no mercado chinês ao suspender a filtragem em seu serviço de buscas e ao acusar a China de supostos ciberataques", disse o funcionário.

"É algo completamente errado. Não opomos sem compromissos à politização de assuntos comerciais e expressamos nosso descontentamento e indignação ao Google por suas acusações e condutas irrazoáveis", acrescentou.

O Google anunciou nesta segunda que pôs fim à censura no sistema de buscas chinês do Google.cn, que existia por ordem das autoridades chinesas, e avisou que os internautas estão sendo redirecionados ao site de Hong Kong, Google.hk.

"Hoje deixamos de censurar nossos serviços de busca: Google Search, Google News e Google Imagens no Google.cn. Os usuários de Internet que visitarem o site Google.cn serão redirecionados ao Google.com.hk, onde disponibilizamos resultados não censurados em chinês simplificado, especialmente concebidos para usuários da China continental e acessados através de nossos servidores instalados em Hong Kong", explicou o diretor-jurídico do Google, David Drummond, no blog oficial da empresa.

"O governo chinês foi muito claro ao longo de nossas conversas sobre o fato de que a autocensura era um requisito legal não negociável", explicou Drummond, acrescentando que "esta nova aproximação é uma solução sensata ante as dificuldades que encontramos" e espera "que o governo respeite" esta decisão do Google.

Entretanto, a empresa anunciou que pretende manter uma equipe de vendas, pesquisa e desenvolvimento na China.

"Enquanto ocorrerem operações de negócios do Google, temos a intenção de continuar com os trabalhos de pesquisa e desenvolvimento na China, assim como manter uma presença nas vendas no país, ainda que, obviamente, o tamanho da equipe de vendas dependa da capacidade dos usuários da China continental de acessarem o Google.com.hk", afirmou Drummond.

O Google anunciou nesta segunda-feira (22/3) que pôs fim à censura no sistema de buscas chinês do Google.cn, que existia por ordem das autoridades chinesas, e avisou que os internautas estão sendo redirecionados ao site de Hong Kong, Google.hk.

"Hoje deixamos de censurar nossos serviços de busca: Google Search, Google News e Google Imagens no Google.cn. Os usuários de Internet que visitarem o site Google.cn serão redirecionados ao Google.com.hk, onde disponibilizamos resultados não censurados em chinês simplificado, especialmente concebidos para usuários da China continental e acessados através de nossos servidores instalados em Hong Kong", explicou o diretor-jurídico do Google, David Drummond, no blog oficial da empresa.

"O governo chinês foi muito claro ao longo de nossas conversas sobre o fato de que a autocensura era um requisito legal não negociável", explicou Drummond, acrescentando que "esta nova aproximação é uma solução sensata ante as dificuldades que encontramos" e espera "que o governo respeite" esta decisão do Google.

Entretanto, a empresa anunciou que pretende manter uma equipe de vendas, pesquisa e desenvolvimento na China. "Enquanto ocorrerem operações de negócios do Google, temos a intenção de continuar com os trabalhos de pesquisa e desenvolvimento na China, assim como manter uma presença nas vendas no país, ainda que, obviamente, o tamanho da equipe de vendas dependa da capacidade dos usuários da China continental de acessarem o Google.com.hk", afirmou Drummond.

A China reagiu à decisão afirmando que o Google "violou sua promessa escrita" e se engana "por completo" ao deixar de censurar seu motor de buscas chinês.

O comentário foi feito por um funcionário encarregado da internet no gabinete de informação do Conselho de Estado, segundo a agência de notícias estatal chinesa Xinhua.

[SAIBAMAIS]"O Google violou a promessa escrita que assinou quando entrou no mercado chinês ao suspender a filtragem em seu serviço de buscas e ao acusar a China de supostos ciberataques", disse o funcionário.

"É algo completamente errado. Não opomos sem compromissos à politização de assuntos comerciais e expressamos nosso descontentamento e indignação ao Google por suas acusações e condutas irrazoáveis", acrescentou.

On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

In terms of Google's wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D; work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Earlier this year Google made the announcement that it is reviewing its business operations in China and considering possible closure due to China's cyberattacks and limits on free speech. Google today stopped censoring its search services (Google Search, Google News, and Google Images) on its chinese website, Google.cn and users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Hong Kong's site, Google.com.hk. David Drummond, Googles Chief Legal Officer writes:

"Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services."

Also since it is highly likely that the Chinese government will block access to Google's uncensored services, the company has launched a specific site which updates regularly each day and keeps users informed of which Google services are available in China.

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More under: Censorship, Policy & Regulation, Web

Google's followed through on its promise to promote free speech in China, as Chinese citizens who attempt to conduct searches on Google.cn today will not encounter censored results.  Instead, they will redirected to Google.com.hk, where Google is offering an interface and uncensored search results in simplified Chinese.

David Drummond, Google's SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, announced this move minutes ago on the Official Google Blog.  He explained, "We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced - it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China."

 

With regards to the obvious question of whether the Chinese government will allow this maneuver, Drummond then continued, "We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.  We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China."

Finally, here's a statement making clear that Google doesn't want to cut all ties with China, and also that Google's Chinese employees shouldn't be punished for anything that's happened.  Drummond wrote, "In terms of Google's wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk.  Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them."

Some time around 2.50am this morning, Google turned the plug off G.cn and Google.com.cn, and redirected users to Google.com.hk with this message "欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家" ["Welcome to the new home of Google Search in China"]. Users in mainland China using Google.com also reported being automatically directed to Google.com.hk (we found this to be true on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari. Chrome did not direct Google.com to Google.com.hk). Using the Google search bar on Firefox and Internet Explorer also returns results through Google HK.

David Drummond, Google's Senior Vice President, and Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, writes on the official Google blog:

On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

In terms of Google's wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D; work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

Does this mean Google.com.hk will be blocked very soon in China? Possibly, but even without a complete ban, the keyword-activated blocks continue to work very well. A search for "天安门事件“ ("Tiananmen incident") resulted in a connection reset as soon as we hit the Return key.

If you're a Google fanboy or fangirl who can't live without your Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Picasa, etc., you will want to make sure you get your VPN. Now.

[h/t to Andy Best]

At 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Google (GOOG) Chief Legal Officer David Drummond announced that the search giant was not only ending its policy of censoring search results in China, but shutting down its Chinese Web site altogether. Here are a few excerpts of Drummond's statement:

We had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. ...

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. ...

We intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.

The last bit sounds particularly ominous, given the nature of the government Google's been working with. Obviously, a lot more will follow on this announcement, and we'll keep you posted on the latest developments.

 

El 12 de enero anunciamos en este blog que Google y más de veinte compañías fueron víctimas de un sofisticado ciber ataque originado en China, y que durante nuestra investigación sobre este ataque encontramos evidencia sugiriendo que cuentas de Gmail de una docena de activistas de los derechos humanos conectados a China eran rutinariamente ingresados por terceras partes, fundamentalmente a través de phishing o malware colocado en sus computadoras. También dijimos que estos ataques, y el espionaje que dejó al descubierto - combinado con intentos en los últimos años de poner más restricciones a la libertad de prensa en China, incluyendo el persistente bloqueo a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs y Blogger - nos llevó a concluir que no podíamos seguir censurando los resultados de búsquedas en Google.cn.

Así es como hoy hemos dejado de aplicar censura a nuestros servicios de búsqueda - Google Search, Google Noticias, y Google Images - en Google.cn. Los usuarios utilizando Google.cn hoy están siendo redireccionados a Google.com.hk, donde estamos brindando búsquedas sin censura en chino simplificado, especificamente diseñado para usuarios en China continental y entregado a través de nuestros servers en Hong Kong. Los usuarios en Hong Kong van a seguir recibiendo sus resultados sin censura, también de Google.com.hk. Debido al exceso de carga en nuestros servers en Hong Kong y la dificultad de estos cambios, los usuarios pueden experimentar alguna pérdida de velocidad en el servicio o encontrar algun producto que esté temporariamente sin servicio, a medida que hacemos el cambio de sistema.

Encontrar la manera de honrar nuestro compromiso de dejar de censurar los resultados de nuestro buscador chino ha sido difícil. Queremos que la mayor cantidad de personas en el mundo tengan acceso a nuestro servicio, incluyendo usuarios en China continental. Pero el gobierno chino ha sido muy claro durante nuestras discusiones que la autocensura es una cláusula legal no negociable. Creemos que la solución de proveer resultados sin censura en chino simplificado desde Google.com.hk es una solución razonable a los desafíos que se nos han impuesto - es totalmente legal y va a aumentar significativamente el acceso a la información para la gente de China. Esperamos que el gobierno chino respete nuestra decisión, si bien somos conscientes que pueden en el momento que quieran bloquear el acceso a nuestros servicios. Seremos por lo tanto cuidadosos en el monitoreo de problemas de acceso, y para ello hemos creado esta nueva página, que vamos a actualizar todos los días para que los usuarios puedan saber qué servicio está disponible en China.

En términos de las operaciones amplias de Google, esperamos continuar con investigación y desarrollo en China y también mantener una presencia comercial, si bien el tamaño de nuestra fuerza de ventas va a depender obviamente de la posibilidad que tengan los usuarios de China de acceder al sitio Google.com.hk. Finalmente, queremos aclarar que todas estas decisiones fueron tomadas e implementadas por nuestros ejecutivos en los Estados Unidos y que ninguno de nuestros empleados en China puede o debe ser responsabilizado por estas decisiones. Pese a todas las incertidumbres que han vivido desde que anuciamos nuestra decisión, ellos se han concentrado en seguir brindando servicio a los usuarios de China y sus clientes. Estamos muy orgullosos de ellos.

El gigante informático Google anunció el desvío a su portal en Hong Kong de todas las búsquedas dirigidas a su explorador en China para evitar la censura del Gobierno de Pekín. Desde hoy los visitantes de su portal en China, google.cn, son redirigidos al de Hong Kong, google.hk, según dijo la compañía en un comunicado.

"Creemos que esta nueva estrategia para proporcionar búsquedas sin censura en chino simplificado a través de google.com.hk es una solución razonable", afirma el director legal de la empresa, David Drummond, en el blog corporativo.

El directivo insistió en que la medida es "totalmente legal" y permitirá a los internautas de China acceder a páginas de Internet que el Gobierno anteriormente les vetaba, como Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs y Blogger.

No obstante, reconoció que Pekín puede bloquear el acceso a sus servidores en Hong Kong. Google ha afirmado que mantendrá sus operaciones de investigación en China y su departamento de ventas, aunque el tamaño de su plantilla dependerá de si los usuarios chinos pueden tener acceso a google.com.uk, es decir, si el Gobierno no lo bloquea.

En enero, la compañía reveló que fue víctima de un ataque por parte de piratas informáticos y que descubrió que se habían intervenido los correos electrónicos de defensores de los derechos humanos en China. Esos factores, más la censura impuesta por el Gobierno, le hicieron informar que sopesaba salir de China, pese a que es el mayor mercado de Internet, con 384 millones de usuarios.

Preguntado sobre el tema, el portavoz de la Casa Blanca, Robert Gibbs, reiteró hoy en una rueda de prensa que "China y Estados Unidos tienen una relación madura donde tienen cabida los desacuerdos".

Search giant moves operation to Hong Kong to avoid Beijing's rules after two-month standoff over internet freedom
Liveblog: Google shuts down Chinese search engine

Google shut down its search service on the Chinese mainland tonight after a two-month standoff with Beijing over internet freedom and alleged cyber-attacks by hackers. The company shifted its Chinese-language offering to Hong Kong, allowing it to stop self-censoring but risking the ire of the Chinese authorities.

Initial tests tonight suggested that the Chinese government's filtering system would still prevent mainland users seeing the results of many sensitive searches. The search engine shocked the industry when it announced in January that it was no longer willing to remove sensitive material from results, as it had to do to operate from the mainland.

The furore highlighted the challenges of doing business in China for western companies and drew a line under the era of unfettered optimism about the internet's ability to change the country.

The company now believes it has found a legal way out, and said it intended to maintain its research, development and advertising sales business in China.

But it acknowledged that authorities could block the site.

While google.cn now redirects visitors to google.com.hk, the Chinese government's internet filtering system, "the Great Firewall", prevented results being returned when searches were conducted using sensitive words and phrases.

The use of English and Chinese phrases such as "Tiananmen Square 1989" on google.com.hk resulted in the internet connection being reset.

Although Hong Kong is part of China, the "one country, two systems" framework means it operates under different laws. Google already had a search service there using the territory's traditional characters, but has added a simplified Chinese service for mainland users.

"We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced – it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China," said the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond in a statement on the Google blog.

"We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services."

Google has created a new web page to allow people to monitor the services are available in China.

Drummond acknowledged that the company had found it hard to find a solution to their promise to stop censoring.

But acknowledging concerns about the repercussions of angering authorities, Google added: "We would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them."

The company has several hundred staff on the mainland.

The announcement came at 3am in China, meaning that there has been no response from officials as yet. Rebecca MacKinnon, visiting fellow at Princeton's Centre for Information Technology Policy, said: "It appears they are not doing anything that violates Chinese law – google.cn has ceased to exist. What they are doing in Hong Kong is in bounds of the law there."

"Clearly they want to keep R&D; and ad sales so I guess it's in the Chinese government's court to figure out whether they should be allowed to do that."

She added: "I don't know if they would block the whole thing or just make sure that you can't search for anything sensitive anyway - it depends on how hardline they want to be. Google is not defying Chinese law on Chinese soil."

On Twitter, a blogger Michael Anti wrote: "Google Quit is a waking-up call for all Chinese netizens: We are not 2nd class. Like all, we deserve an uncensored Internet."

While some Chinese internet users have welcomed the company's decision, others warned that its departure would reduce the flow of information.

Google said in January that its decision to stop censoring followed a cyber-attack, originating from China, that it believed was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists as well as intellectual property. It has yet to disclose details of that incident.

But it also cited increasing censorship of the internet over the last years, which has seen authorities closing thousands of domestic sites and blocking an increasing number hosted overseas.

Google has around a third of the mainland search market in terms of revenue. Its departure from the mainland will be good news for Baidu, the dominant player, but may also prompt other companies to enter the market.

Google.com is available from China, but has been blocked at times in the past.

Chinese authorities initially gave a muted response to Google's January announcement, but later hardened their line – particularly after US secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave a major speech on internet freedom. Earlier this month, Li Yizhong, minister for industry and information technology, told reporters: "If you want to do something that disobeys Chinese law and regulations, you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible and you will have to pay the consequences."

This weekend state media accused Google of "politicization" by "groundlessly accusing the Chinese government" of supporting cyber attacks and by trying to export "culture, values and ideas".

The government has also denied any connection to cyber-attacks, saying hacking is illegal and that China has repeatedly been a target.

Two months after a series of suspicious China-based cyber-attacks, Google has stopped censoring Chinese search results, and google.com.cn now redirects to a Hong-Kong based site, google.com.hk.

David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, explains the decision in a blog post:

On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

In terms of Google's wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D; work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

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Google is now redirecting users from its mainland China website to its Hong Kong website as "a sensible solution to the challenges" the company faces. In a blog post on the company's official site, David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer, stated: "Figuring out how to make good on our promise [...]

[Source: HDS] On February 14th, 2010 in Valencia, the black trimaran of the American Challenger, BMW ORACLE Racing, equipped with a wing of 68 meters, beat the catamaran of the Swiss Defender, Alinghi, to win the 33rd America’s Cup Match. Many talents from the French marine industry (sailors, naval architects, technicians and engineers) contributed to the development of what just might be the fastest racing boat of its size ever built. Among them, experts from HDS have shared in this technological challenge and contributed to the birth of the largest wing ever built for a sailing yacht.

In nearly twenty years, HDS, the company from Brest has written some of the most beautiful pages of modern sailing history. Specialists of structural engineering, these “men living in the shadows” follow the sailors and their teams in the design of always larger, lighter, more reliable and more efficient yachts.

From the Vendée Globe monohulls, to multihulls such as Groupama 3, Banque Populaire V or the Hydroptere, this team led by Hervé Devaux has collected no less than five records in 2009. This same team, internationally recognised, has also been involved in eight editions of the America’s Cup, which is a different world, where design and creativity have no limits.

Summer 2009, Anacortes (USA), apparent structure of the main element of the wing. The lower part is used as a mast and all the vertical parts stiffens the profile and is then covered with a film used in aviation. Photo copyright Steven Robert/HDS

Multihulls - a new challenge for the cup
The legal battle of this 33rd America’s Cup has often overshadowed the sporting side of the event and has also forced the designers into a ' no mans land' of constantly changing deadlines, different venues and new timelines.

In July 2007, BMW Oracle Racing challenged the Swiss Defender. The U.S. team then began work on the design of a maxi trimaran and called upon the French firm of architects Van Peteghem-Lauriot Prevost and HDS for the design. Both are widely recognised as leaders in the field of multihulls. Hervé Devaux, Aurélien Miller et Steven Robert then join the adventure. The latter remembers: “We knew that, potentially, the racing could have started one year after that initial challenge, so we had to work fast. We extrapolated what we knew (Orma trimarans, Groupama 3 ...) by scaling up to a 90-foot beam. We determined loads and defined the structural concepts of the yacht, masts and appendages. Legal proceedings were continuing and we gained more time to conduct a real development campaign. The measurements of hundreds of sensors were analyzed in order to optimise every element. Every kilogram saved was invested in new systems to improve performance. From a versatile boat - a good 'all-rounder' - we went to a pure racing machine. With modifications to the floats, bows, masts and appendages, the trimaran had already gone through several significant changes before the wingsail arrived.”

An early manuscrit of Hervé Devaux's drawing during the wing lift arm's design. Photo copyright Hervé Devaux /HDS

The wing is the thing
In 1988, the American catamaran Stars&Stripes; beat the massive monohull KZ1 from New Zealand - in large part, due to a rigid wing sail. The BOR design team, under the direction of Kiwi Mike Drummond, was seriously thinking about the possibility of integrating this concept, this time for the trimaran. “We joined a small team with Hervé, developing the first steps of the secret project of the wing” continues Steven. “The ‘go-ahead’ was given on the 1st April, 2009. I then moved to the production site of Anacortes (USA) where nearly 70 boatbuilders were involved in the project. All day, I supported the engineering and in the evenings I would finalise some of the designs! After five months of construction we assembled the wing in San Diego. Those of us who saw the birth and development of the wing sail were beginning to get accustomed to its size... but when on the 10th of November the two cranes lifted it for the first time and it was attached to the boat - that was a very special moment. The boat was already flying a hull later that same afternoon and the sailors returned to the base with a big smile… We already had some of our answers.”

From an initial 60 meters, the wing was then extended to 68 meters, for an overall surface profile near 650 square meters, more than the double that of a Boeing 747 wing. The sail consists of a main wing element and eight moving flaps. No less than 450 carbon/nomex sandwich panels and reinforcements straps have been assembled, representing nearly two kilometres of tapings.

10 times less loading
Despite its construction and the huge logistics involved in using the wingsail, this prototype is a beacon of simplicity. “The wing simply replaces the mainsail. So we get rid of the issue of mainsail leech tensions, mast/boom links and all the systems involved in controlling the shape of such an enormous mainsail. The optimal shape exists on the wing without any effort. In light conditions, it generates about 2.5 tons of loads on the platform compared to 20 to 25 tons for a conventional rig - a ratio of 1 to 10 with about an equal weight,” explains Steven. “To cover the frames of the wingsail, we chose a film used on aircraft, for example, which perfectly shrinks over the frame when heat is applied. It is ultimately that film tension which has guided us in our calculations to design the skeleton of the wing more than the forces generated by the aerodynamics loads.”

Exchange of expertise
In this campaign, the boundaries between the “French world” of multihulls and the Anglo-Saxone, monohull culture of the America’s Cup have faded, allowing designers to mix their knowledge and exchange ideas. “For HDS, this experience has put us in an international mode, making us experience other design methods and manufacturing techniques. We have, I think, sometimes guided the team to more pragmatic choices as we usually do with projects having smaller budgets and where we find similar constraints of time,” says the 31-year old engineer “From a personal standpoint, this was also an opportunity to experience the daily life of a team and to win the America's Cup in my first campaign!”

 

Will they never learn?

We’ve yet to see a bullet-proof video-game-to-film adap that doesn't resemble a big-budget pile of excrement, yet still Hollywood keeps on plugging away at the idea.

But could Kane & Lynch: Dead Men be different? Bruce Willis has already signed on to the project as Kane, a death row inmate who is sprung from jail to recover a pinched fortune. It’s a task that he must complete along with a schizophrenic killer called Lynch.

Jamie Foxx is apparently on the verge of signing on to play Lynch, which means this video game adap already has something none of the others did – Willis and Foxx, on screen together, no doubt blowing crap up and having a grand old time.

Which sounds pretty awesome. But we can’t get past the video game bit. Relatively unknown scribe Kyle Ward has written the script (he’s also signed on for Hitman 2, God spare us). So even if this does feature a nutso Willis-Foxx action man double-act, we won’t hold our breaths.

In other casting news, Reese Witherspoon is being circled to star in a film based on blogsite thepioneerwoman.com, created by Ree Drummond. The story follows a city girl who falls in love with a cowboy and his countryside.

So Reese seems to be returning to her throwaway rom-coms roots (this sounds like a carbon copy of that Sweet Home Alabama dreck), which comes as a massive disappointment after her brilliant turn in Walk The Line.

Maybe Reese should get in on that Kane & Lynch action - who's that woman in the above pic? Granted it looks like an undignified part - but still a million times better than what she's already doing.

Feeling the Willis-Foxx mojo?

Total Film on Facebook

Google (GOOG) is not a company known for making big mistakes, but not too long ago, it stumbled into the worst strategic blunder in its history. It’s not the acquisition of YouTube, which cost the company $1.6 billion, plus whatever it will take to settle Viacom’s (VIA.B) $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit. It’s not Google Buzz, which violated the privacy of untold thousands of Gmail users and prompted a class-action lawsuit. It’s not Google Book Search, which has led some of the nation’s most important intellectuals to wonder whether the company poses an existential threat to libraries around the world.

In fact, Google’s big bonehead play was seen by almost everyone as a great triumph, the latest in a long list of milestones along the way to world domination. Yet it was anything but that.

It was a mistake that helped save Microsoft (MSFT), its most dangerous rival, tens of billions of dollars that it can use in its war for supremacy on the Web. It’s a mistake that also infuriated not just Microsoft, but some of the most important institutional investors in the country. And it alerted the American and European governments to Google’s growing omnipotence, leading to numerous expensive and possibly brutal antitrust investigations. Google may spend years recovering from this one terrible error.

In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo (YHOO) and become the second-largest search engine in America after Google. The scale of the deal was remarkable; a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would account for almost 30 percent of the search advertising market, but the software company would have to plunk down a staggering $44.6 billion in cash and stock. What was perhaps even more remarkable, however, was Google’s reaction.

Up until then, Google’s executives had been content to quietly get bigger and bigger, always murmuring polite compliments about the competition and letting them wither on the vine. But this time, Google lashed out.

In addition to deploying lobbyists in Washington, Google’s most senior officials publicly denounced the deal and called on government officials to step in. “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” wrote David Drummond, Google’s head lawyer. “The two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' e-mail, IM, and Web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions.”

CEO Eric Schmidt was even more blunt, telling Portfolio, “The concentration of Microsoft's resources and its history, combined with the very large share that it would have in certain applications … could be used essentially to break the Internet.”

Google can’t take credit for killing the Microhoo merger; that, um, “honor” belongs Yahoo’s founder Jerry Yang, who couldn’t let go of his baby and cost investors a fortune in the end. But Google certainly made life difficult for Microsoft, raising the specter of Justice Department officials combing over the deal and picking over Microsoft just as they had done nine years earlier. The combination of Google’s hand-wringing and Yang’s ego ultimately proved too much for Microsoft, which walked away from one of the biggest deals Silicon Valley had ever seen.

And that, it turns out, was the best thing that had happened to Microsoft since MS-DOS. Consider what Microsoft would have had to do in order to digest Yahoo. It would have had to shell out at least $44.6 billion in cash and stock just to get the whole process started. Getting the deal past federal regulators, primed to be suspicious after Google and others beat the antitrust war drum, would have been an enormous headache. Although Microsoft has a lot of experience buying and absorbing other companies, integrating a separate operation of 13,000 employees would take years and result in a lot of expensive buyouts and layoffs. And there’s no guarantee that integrating the two companies would even work. (See AOL/Time Warner, the disaster that was.)

What did Microsoft get instead? It cut a different deal with Yahoo, in which Microsoft’s search engine Bing would power Yahoo searches, but Yahoo would collect 80 percent of the search ad revenue it sold for the next 10 years. Bing, born just last year, would suddenly account for 28.3 percent of the search market. Bing could use Yahoo’s brand to advance its own. Microsoft wouldn’t have to deal with redundant content or portals. Yahoo’s brand and search market-share were the only things Microsoft wanted in the first place, and under this deal, that’s what it would get. Two weeks ago, the feds approved the new Yahoo-Microsoft arrangement. If you don’t count Yahoo’s cut of future ad revenue, Microsoft just got everything it wanted from Yahoo for free.

“I think they got a much better deal the second time around,” says Clayton Moran, a tech analyst for the Benchmark Company. “They don’t take on the integration, they have much less financial risk, and they get the prize asset they wanted. I definitely think Microsoft ended up better off.”

But Microsoft didn’t feel this way two years ago. Especially when, just weeks after the deal died, Google announced its own, multibillion-dollar search deal with Yahoo. To the boys up in Redmond, this was sheer gall. Google, the new power man in the yard, had just managed to intervene in Microsoft’s affairs and start a new deal to enhance its already dominant market share, while coming off smelling like a rose and smearing Microsoft as Borg in the public’s eye yet again.

As Nicholas Thompson and Freg Vogelstein put it in their estimable piece in Wired magazine, this was just too much to stomach. “Frankly, we saw history repeating itself,” Microsoft’s head flack John Kelly told them. “We realized that we were going to have to speak up.”

Microsoft mobilized the army of lobbyists it had left over from its own Justice Department war and went to work, warning the feds of Google’s alarming market share, and the potential it had to abuse it. It also made new allies: Amazon (AMZN), AT&T (ATT), public interest groups, and the Association of National Advertisers. Eventually, thanks in part to Microsoft’s pressure, the feds killed Google’s deal with Yahoo. But it did something equally important along the way: It fed the growing perception, among lawmakers, regulators, and the public at large, that Google was a dangerous monopoly. By late 2009, Microsoft’s legion of lobbyists and lawyers were reportedly holding weekly “screw Google” meetings in Washington, D.C.

Recently we’ve seen the fruits of this labor. Three weeks ago, the European Commission declared that it was launching an inquiry into whether Google was using its massive search market share to damage three of its smaller competitors. Of the three complainants, one—an online price-comparison firm called Ciao—is owned by its archrival Microsoft. And a second—a similar price-comparison company known as Foundem—belongs to the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, a lobbying group that has complained about Google’s monopolistic practices the length and breadth of Europe. Who created the Initiative? You guessed it: Microsoft.

A few weeks before that, an attorney hired by Google to collect a few unpaid bills from an Ohio Internet firm received a startlingly aggressive antitrust countersuit. The lawyer handling the countersuit just happened to be Charles Rule, an outside lawyer who specializes in antitrust issues for Microsoft. As this and a second antitrust lawsuit against Google go into discovery, Rule will learn all sorts of interesting things about Google—and don’t think he’ll wipe his memory clean when he’s done.

There’s no denying this strategy has paid off. Because let’s face it: Google is effectively a monopoly. It has 65 percent of the American search market and at least 90 percent in France and Germany, where regulators have a much lower threshold for taking antitrust action. Google’s trust capital has also declined in another, not-insignificant segment: the investor class. Pension funds, venture capitalists, and 401(k) managers all had a chance to seriously cash in on the Yahoo deal. After Google played a role in killing it, Yahoo’s stock price dropped in half and has remained there ever since. These players know enough not to take it personally when Google brought out the long knives. But among these people, the days of pretending that the search giant just happens to make money on the path to saving the world are over.

“I hear this ‘Don’t Be Evil’ nonsense, and I’m like, c’mon,” says tech analyst Kim Caughey, whose Fort Pitt Capital Group has invested in Microsoft. “You’re kind of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If you’re just going to behave according to the market, I can understand that. But touting themselves in this peace loving, free-search-for-everybody thing, that doesn’t obscure the fact that they were scooping up great gobs of market share. Don’t pretend you’re not like any other company trying to maximize profits.”

It’s entirely possible that Google knew that sooner or later, there would only be two players in the search market: Google and someone else. And that its goal was to push that day as far back as possible, keeping its competitors from joining forces just long enough to squeeze every last drop of profit before it faced a serious, consolidated rival. Opposing the first Microhoo iteration and toying with a Yahoo partnership bought Google two years of continued dominance, and that sounds pretty smart.

But consider this. In 2007, before the Microhoo deal broke to the surface, Google spent just $1.52 million on Beltway lobbyists. Last year, that figure rose to more than $4 million.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s lobbying expenditure dropped from $9 million to $6.72 million during the same period.

Some of these lobbying efforts are aggressive, of course, as the company tries to influence the Federal Communications Commission to tweak rules regarding broadband and the wireless spectrum, for example. But a huge chunk of that cash is dedicated to defensive lobbying, in which each company tries to convince the feds that it’s not a predatory trust. Which company has had to spend more and more lately?

Sooner or later, policymakers were going to think of Google as the New Borg. But by raising questions about who was really dominating the search market, the company catalyzed that process. Google provoked the excitable alpha dogs who run Microsoft, irritated investors, and called attention to its own supremacy. And it saved its worst enemy $44.6 billion.

All that for two more years of the status quo. In the years to come, Eric Schmidt and the boys may well look back on 2008 and ask, “What were we thinking?”

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology is halting testing of EHR products against "Stage 1" criteria for meaningful use until the organization earns accreditation from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

"We have reviewed the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [released earlier this month] regarding certifying bodies, and we feel confident about our prospects of becoming accredited. We plan to file an application with the Office of the National Coordinator as soon as it is ready to accept them. Until CCHIT becomes accredited, we are suspending any initial or incremental Modular testing until we can test against an accredited Stage 1 ARRA test script," reads a notice posted on the CCHIT website. CCHIT has scheduled a public "town call" via telephone and the web for Thursday at 3 p.m., CDT to discuss its plans.

The decision comes as CCHIT formally submitted comments to ONC on the interim final rule on standards and certification of EHRs, in which the organization warns of an "unintended deceleration in the pace of adoption" because the rule is too complex in some areas and contradictory in others. "A particular concern surrounds the reporting of quality measures, with the IFR calling for standards and measures that are yet to be defined or that require significant revision to make them computable from EHR-based data," CCHIT says.

Meanwhile, the Drummond Group, a potential competitor to CCHIT, confirmed its intention to apply for ONC accreditation as a certification body.

For more:
- read this CCHIT notice
- find out how to participate in the CCHIT town call
- check out this Government Health IT story
- read this Drummond Group blog post

Related Articles:
HIMSS10: ONC proposes two-phase EHR certification plan
CCHIT to launch 'modular' certification in October

At the moment, Kick2Kick is half way through previewing the 16 clubs and once we have done that, we will preview the 2010 season before the start on the 25th March. We started off with Fremantle, then the Bulldogs, the Kangaroos and Collingwood. Last week we have looked at Richmond, Sydney, the West Coast Eagles, Essendon and Melbourne. This week we started off with Geelong and look at whether they can still be a force in 2010.

Western Bulldogs defeated St Kilda by 40 points

40 years is a long time to not win a Grand Final of any type let alone play in a Grand Final but Saturday night was a night to remember for the Dogs but I get the feeling they are not satisfied with just the pre season competition premiership. The night also meant they know they can not only match but can beat the Saints.

This pre season has been almost perfect from the Dogs (expect Johno missing the Grand Final) with the final keys playing and performing in Barry Hall (Michael Tuck medal winner) and extra talls Tom Williams and Andreas Everitt playing well.

A worrying sign for the Saints is that again Kosi, Milne & Schneider was too quite up forward in an important game and it was left for Riewoldt to try and drag his team back into the game after being 22 points behind in the first quarter. More worrying signs was the Dogs had 20 more tackles throughout the game and only kicked 3 goals in the first and last quarters where the Dogs managed to kick 10 goals.

Regional Challenge Games Wrapup

The last “official” hit out for these teams, while some don’t take the whole series seriously, they do for the final hitout before the regular season. While for other teams they are still madly trying to get together some of the finer details sorted for their playing style, just like Carlton with their forward line.

Adelaide defeated Carlton by 1 point

Carlton have improved their forward line and steadily we are beginning to see how it can all happen with 3 goals to O’hAilpin and two each to Betts and Robinson. You can then add the improved fitness to Waite and while I still see question marks, you can begin to see that maybe they can kick a score week in, week out.

For Adelaide, Kurt Tipett was again the difference with 3 goals with Taylor Walker and Jared Petrenko two goals each. They have now won the last two games which will act as a good warm up for the season proper in two weeks time.

Brisbane defeated Hawthorn by 11 points

It was a scrappy, windy game but the news that has every Hawks fans again shaking their head was that Roughead finished the game with an ice pack on his knee. Last week it was Lewis and Taylor breaking a leg and now its Roughead. Although it was only a precautionary I must ask who walked across the black cat?

For Brisbane Fevola was again quite with no goals but the other off season recruits in Brent Staker, Andrew Raines and Matthew Maguire all stood out along and Simon Black, Luke Power and Josh Drummond playing their first pre season game for the year.

Sydney defeated North Melbourne by 42 points

I think both teams would be happy with the game, result aside as Sydneys forward line is looking dangerous with O’Keefe (four goals), Goodes (two) and White (three) functioning (and do not forget to add Bradshaw) and Wells continuing to step up his midfield game time.

West Coast Eagles defeated Melbourne by 38 points

Colin Sylvia broke his jaw which will put another dent in their best 22 and forward line. The Demons best players where the established players MacDonald, Bruce & Green. From the four pre season games, Melbourne are the only team to not win a game.

For the Eagles Daniel Kerr and Matthew Priddis played after two weeks off and their forward line again functioned with Hansen (3 goals), Mark Nicoski and Mitch Brown playing the new Adam Hunter swing man.

Essendon defeated Richmond by 72 points

Hardwick is happy with his sides progress after loosing 12 goals? He must know more than me, maybe its the 5 year plan he is talking about or the fact that a kid who has not even played an AFL game is their best player.

In Kick2Kick’s Essendon’s season preview I talked about whether they could find enough goal kickers, well in this game, they had 14 individual goal kickers. Is this a once off or a preview for the year? Maybe whats even better than the 14 goal kickers was that Scott Gumbleton got through the game and showed why every Bomber has been praying over his body.

Collingwood defeated Port Adelaide by 81 points

This was the Port Adelaide we are used to see, great one week (just lost against the Dogs) and then terrible the week after, maybe it was because they had to travel for three weeks in a row and even at the start of the season, that will tire any team out. A bright note for Port is that they’ve managed to look at 37 players in the four weeks, they now their list and who can play.

Collingwood on the other hand kicked 27 goals and it was the usual suspects that shined for them in Luke Ball, John Anthony (three goals), Tarkyn Lockyer, Paul Medhurst, Dale Thomas and Scott Pendlebury (two goals) and Leon Davis.

Geelong defeated Fremantle by 31 points

This was Geelongs first win in the pre season but they only played 3 games as their last weeks game was cancelled and it showed with Freo getting to a 3 goal lead at half time even with Geelong playing 19 premiership players. Geelong then kicked 8 goals to none in the third quarter which set up a 5 goal lead and the game was over.

Apart from that third quarter, amazingly Fremantle won the other three quarters but for Freo to play and win finals, you must play four quarters. Until they do that, Freo will stay the laughing stock of the AFL.

NAB Grand Final & Challenge Games Talking Points

I am sure we all have many issues, point of views and arguments we want to jump on the soapbox and talk about. Well this is your chance…

Please give us your thoughts in the comments section below or add your own talking points. The questions will be asked in bold and my response will be un-bold under them. Your input and comments help us make Kick2Kick a better website, so please express your opinions.

1. Which club(s) have impressed you in this pre season?
   • Kangaroos, Port and the Bulldogs
2. What have you learned in the pre season?
   • Barry Hall is the saviour for the Dogs, imagine how many more Grand Finals they could have played in if they recruited a big forward?
   • Apart from four or five teams (Geelong, Collingwood, Adelaide, St Kilda, Bulldogs & maybe Brisbane), there will be a log jam of other teams in Hawthorn, Essendon, Carlton, West Coast, Port, Sydney, North & Freo fighting for 2 or 3 spots in the top 8.
3. Apart from Riewoldt, is the Saints forward line their weakness?
   • They are all inconsistent which is the worry and to me the weakness, forget their lack of pace. Kosi, Schneider and Milne are too hot and cold, you can afford to have one forward like that but three?
4. How can we fix the NAB pre season?
   • Scrap it… I have been playing with some ideas, so let us know and we can explore some this week together.
5. Who has been the worst team? Richmond or Melbourne?
   • Richmond has won a game, while Melbourne has not but Melbourne have been in with a chance with their games unlike Richmond who was smashed by Essendon & the Hawks. For Richmond has been the worst team by far.
6. Do you agree with Saints coach Lyon saying its the game they needed to loose?
   • Never agree with that load of spin rubbish by the coaches but it did show up weaknesses that maybe by winning it covered them up.

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Related K2K Posts

• 2010 NAB Grand Final Tips (3)
• Saints 2010 Dreamteam Preview (0)
• 2010 NAB Semi Finals Wrapup (0)
• 2010 NAB Round 3 Tips (6)
• Bulldogs 2010 Season Preview (29)

Joy Dunigan
Ecklund Wins Audi Melges 20 Bacardi Miami Sailing Week, Also Named 2010 Winter Series Champion

March 13, 2010 (Miami, Fla.) - Congratulations to Jeff Ecklund (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.) on STAR, as he and his crew of Harry Melges and Morgan Reeser have won the Audi Melges 20 division of Bacardi's Miami Sailing Week, hosted in part by Coconut Grove Sailing Club (CGSC), supported by Shake-A-Leg Miami and Melges Performance Sailboats. It was the third act of the Miami Winter Series in which Ecklund is also champion. In second overall is Peter Keck (Lake Geneva, Wisc.) on M&M Sailing with Bill Ward and Sam Rogers as crew. Chuck Holzman (Farmington Hills, Mich.) on Flyer was third with crew members Scott Nixon and Pat Drummond.

The Audi Melges 20 and Melges 24 fleets ended the event on a high note with three races a piece. Under absolutely beautiful blue skies, big seas and a steady 18 knots of breeze with gusts up to 22, they went racing. Two Course 4s and a final five-legger completed the day.

Keck came on strong for the first race, acquiring a nice lead to take the win ahead of Eric Wynsma (East Grand Rapids, Mich.) on Superfly followed by Holzman for third. As the day progressed some of the most amazing downwind runs were witnessed for the first time ever in the fleet. For races two and three, Holzman hardlined the competition with a blistering 1-1 finish. In race two, he took an initial lead with Ecklund finishing second, Wynsma was third. At one point in race three, Holzman found himself half way down the run, before the next boat was around the top mark. By this time, fleet leaders Ecklund and Keck had dropped from racing altogether and left Holzman, Michael Kiss (Macatawa Bay, Mich.) on Bacio and Marc Hollerbach (Grosse Pointe Park, Mich.) on Fu to complete the top three.

In the Melges 24, today's conditions were just what the fleet ordered. It was a beautiful sight seeing the Melges 24 ripping downwind, hotter and faster than ever! Topping the fleet was Jennifer Wilson/Donald Wilson (Chicago, Ill.) on Convexity, Steve Kopf (Charleston, S.C.) on Blur in second and Guy Mossman (Charleston, S.C.) on Battle Rhythm finishing third.
View Full Melges 24 Results
View Melges 24 Photo Gallery

Thanks to all the competitors who have participated during the entire series. A very special thanks to Bruce Golison and his extraordinary race management team, especially to Regatta Chairman Ron Rostorfer and team.

TOP TEN RESULTS (After 7 Races)
1.) Jeff Ecklund, STAR; 1-1-3-1-4-2-[16/DNF] = 12
2.) Peter Keck, M&M Sailing; 4-3-1-2-1-11-[16/DNF] = 22
3.) Chuck Holzman, Flyer; 6-6-5-[11]-3-1-1 = 22
4.) Eric Wynsma, Superfly; 2-5-7-5-2-3-6-[7] = 23
5.) Michael Kiss, Bacio; 5-4-4-[8]-7-5-2 = 27
6.) Marc Hollerbach, Fu; 3-9-2-10-[10]-4-3 = 31
7.) Joel Ronning, Catapult; [9]-2-8-7-5-6-7 = 35
8.) Erwyn Naidoo, Bohica; 7-8-6-4-8-[9]-5 = 38
9.) John Arendshorst, Blink; [11]-11-9-3-6-8-4 = 41
10.) Robert Wilber, Cinghaile; 10-7-10-9-[11]-7-9 = 52
Full Audi Melges 20 Results
Official Event Website

The owners of The Hungry Owl restaurant paid $325,000 for a half-acre lot at Cottage Hill and Schillinger roads in front of the Winn-Dixie Shopping Center, where the restaurant leases space, according to Todd Drummond of The Drummond Group, who represented the buyers.

The syrupy Weekend Wogan is enough to clog the arteries, says Miranda Sawyer

Oh, the BBC does make me feel middle-aged. All these changes. First, they're going to shut down 6 Music completely, then they're not shutting it down but replacing it with "2Xtra", on only in the evenings. They're definitely cutting Radcliffe and Maconie down to three nights a week (Why? It's one of the Radio 2's biggest successes) and getting rid of Bruce Dickinson's rock show on 6 Music. (How ungracious, given that the station is supposedly doomed anyway.) And then there's the Wogan/Evans palavers.

Weekend Wogan has been going for three weeks now and… it's a bit of a dog's déjeuner. There seems to be some idea that it's on TV, rather than radio, for a start: if you log on to the Radio 2 website, the big promotion is an invitation to Watch Weekend Wogan, rather than Listen Again. So I did: it was an unsatisfying visual experience, consisting of kill-me-now interviews with backing singers, Wogan reading from a bit of paper with his headphones on, plus live guest Craig David swaggering into the studio, in sunglasses and leather jacket – a moody alien from Planet Tit come to sneer at the Marks & Spencer's-clad masses. His new album is a selection of classic Motown covers. Last week Sharleen Spiteri was on the show. Her new album is a selection of classic film themes. Both concepts make me grumpy. I'm middle-aged in the wrong way.

Weekend Wogan is an easy-like-Sunday-morning mix of live music and celebrity chat. So far, so chat show, but there are also the elements brought over from Terry's old breakfast show: the rude poems sent in by TOGs (Terry's Old Geezers), Janet and John stories, banter with Boggy. These don't work so well in their new environment. Jokes are what the audience wants, both in the studio and at home, but the live audience gets so excited that the wit is killed by over-reaction. No longer do you feel as though you and Wogan are sharing a silly moment. Instead, you're left out: the action is elsewhere. And the music is so bland: Wake Up to Wogan was hardly cutting edge, but two hours of musical syrup clogs the arteries, stills the heart. In other news, Chris Evans is persevering with his upbeat, staccato start to the day, blithely ignoring the online support for his chattier holiday replacement, Richard Allinson. A thought: why didn't the BBC put the comfy-listening Simon Mayo in the breakfast slot and keep Evans where he was?

Enough, enough. Let's turn to Radio 4 for some peace. The station has been making an effort with its one-off documentaries – though it, like the BBC as a whole, shows a worrying tendency to prefer celebrities rather than journalists to present these. Still, when that famous person is ex-KLF man Bill Drummond, you don't mind: his mind is so offbeat, his enthusiasm so thrillingly threatening.

In 2002 Drummond was asked to contribute some work for a Belfast arts festival. He had a sign made and put it up under the Welcome To Belfast sign on the way into the city. The sign said: Twinned With Your Wildest Dreams. His documentary, Belfast: Reimagining the City, was full of similar wonderful surprises. He interviewed local writers, conservationists, sound artists – but the best bits were his own reminiscences and rants. "I hate Dublin," he seethed. "Dublin is so proud of itself. The way it wants to sell itself to the world, the tacky way of reducing what Irish is… Belfast, you get solid 19th-century industrial revolution buildings. In the summer you can smell the heather from the surrounding hills." His rants calmed me down after all that Radio 2 blandness.

Filed under: Beauty, Makeup, Beauty How To

This spring, get ready to shimmer.

Sparkling, iridescent shades are de rigeur for the season, as many beauty companies are launching new loose and pressed shimmer powders -- for both eyes and face -- in shades that range from pretty pastels to eye popping brights. M.A.C. debuted their stack of Crush Metal Pigments, The Body Shop updated their solid Shimmer Cubes in trendy shades, and Christopher Drummond Beauty came out with loose shimmer eyeshadows, to name a few.

"We've had a horrible, treacherous winter that has had us stuck indoors," said Christopher Drummond, celebrity makeup artist and creator of Christopher Drummond Beauty. "People want more color and more fun and that's why shimmer is so big!"

Shimmering shades are an easy way to get creative with your makeup routine and unleash your flirty side, according to Drummond. "It gives you that glowing, fresh look that everyone wants to have for spring," he said.

All well and good -- we're psyched to look springy -- but if you're not a makeup artist, applying loose shimmer can be a little daunting. So we asked Drummond for key makeup tips on how to stand out in shimmer, without going overboard.

Prep and You Won't Regret
When applying shimmer, flaky skin is the enemy. The light reflecting pigments only highlight imperfections, so it's important to prep your skin before shimmering up. "It's always a good idea to exfoliate the skin," says Drummond. "Coming out of winter you want to make sure to wash away dead skin, or you'll have makeup that looks cakey and dry."

After exfoliating, he suggsts following up with a hydrating lotion. "It's very important to moisturize, especially when using a powder foundation," says Drummond. An eye or face primer will also help to refine the skin, even out the application, and help the shimmer stick.

The Eyes Have It
Smooth shimmer onto the eyelids with a large eye shadow brush -- the fluffier, the better, for a light, even application. For a more concentrated application on the eyes, wet a liner brush and apply at the lash line, or pat an eye or facial primer on your lids before sweeping on the shimmer. For added depth, Drummond suggests mixing together your eye shadow textures; a shimmer on top of a matte shadow will add dimension and help your eyes sparkle.

Don't Sweat the Technique
"Everyone wants that J. Lo glow, but there's one thing I've learned and that is not every celebrity has great skin. With the right tools, you can fake it until you make it," says Drummond. For a subtle, all-over glow, he suggests applying a loose shimmer powder, like Saúde Pele Radiance Booster, underneath your foundation. You can mix it with a serum, moisturize, or even your actual foundation, and a small amount will go a long way. For even more glow, use shimmer as a highlighter on the cheekbones and temples to reflect light.

Breaking Beauty Standards
"You don't have to buy a ton of products to look red carpet ready. There's a million things you can do with shimmering products. Apply eyeshadow on your cheeks and lips for a luminous glow. If you're out of blush, lightly brush on a pink eyeshadow. For nighttime shine, dust shimmer into your hair. Get really cheeky, mix it into your lotion and smooth onto the décolleté. You're missing out if you don't try it!"

Do you know which beauty products have stood the test of time for many women? Click here to see if any of these makeup finds are on your must-have list!

Shimmer Shines for Spring 2010: Pro Tips on How to Wear It originally appeared on StyleList on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We didn't learn anything too revelatory about Dolly Parton in this interview, but she's always good for a pithy quote or two, says Elisabeth Mahoney

If A Date With Dolly: Michael Ball Meets Dolly Parton (Radio 2) seemed a bit of a mouthful, Ball offered a shorter version. "When Bally met Dolly," he suggested. It doesn't matter who you send in to interview her, though, as the impression's the same: a brilliant businesswoman who carefully manages her image. "I'm just a very professional Dolly Parton," she said. "I know a lot about me."

So there wasn't much that was new here, though I liked the sound of her husband of 43 years. "Nobody ever sees him," she explained. "He buys all these old tractors." On the secret of such a long marriage, Parton was pithy. "The fact that I stay gone a lot," she laughed.

Bill Drummond travelled, too, in Belfast: Re-imagining the City (Radio 4). He began with a bit of a rant. "Dublin is so proud of itself," he seethed. Belfast, in contrast, felt unloved when he first visited, especially when he realised the city wasn't twinned with anywhere. "I instantly felt sorry for the place," he said. In content this was strong, and I liked the atmospheric production – much ambient noise left in – but Drummond's delivery was stilted in places. He needed to sound less as though he was reading as he wandered around the city he so clearly loves. Elisabeth Mahoney

I have a pdf file that needs to be redesigned so that it meets the standards of createspace.com so I can upload it for publishing. The interior of the pdf created should be 5.5 X 8.5 All transparencies and layers need to be flattened... (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: InDesign, Interior Design, Layout / Formatting, QuarkXPress)

at Canadian Music Week Launch Party with CFCF, Parallels, DVAS - Roosevelt Room 2 Drummond Place Toronto on 2010-03-10

The Guardian

SEC Filing Show Google Management To Take $1 In Comp 24/7 Wall St. (blog) Patrick Pichette, the CFO; David Drummond, the chief legal officer; Alan Eustace, the head of R&D; and Jonathan Rosenberg, head of product management will ... Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page Still Pulling Token $1 SalariesThe Business Insider all 3 news articles »

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is doling out about $8 million in bonuses to several top employees “in recognition of executive officers’ contributions to performance,” according to an SEC filing just filed. All of the payments are up considerably from last year.

The details: CFO Patrick Pichette, SVP Alan Eustace, and SVP Jonathan Rosenberg are each getting $2 million discretionary bonuses, while chief legal officer David Drummond has to settle with $1.7 million. Pichette, Drummond, Eustace and Rosenberg are all also getting their base salaries hiked to $500,000 from $450,000. The top bonus a year ago was $1.64 million to Rosenberg.

Related

• Bad Year For Bonuses? Not For Google Execs

Monetizing The Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the second in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs that I’ll be featuring on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You might be able to try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.

Most frequenters of the mommyblogosphere are familiar by now with Momversation, the video blogging series that features well-known mommy bloggers in a regular discussion of mommy-related topics. Sponsored by Target, Momversation is the brainchild of Rob Morhaim of Deca TV, who started from the premise that there were certain issues that came up repeatedly for mothers blogging on the internet, and that if you could somehow aggregate and combine those conversations in on central hub, then you could create a new kind of content that presented a multiplicity of different voices at once. Since Morhaim’s background was in television, it made sense to use video content as a means of facilitating that discussion, with the thought that the videos could appear on the sites of each of its participant bloggers, thereby providing promotion for the project as well as a “value-add” for the blogs of the panelists who participate in the project.

In terms of generating traffic for the Momversation website, this strategy appears to have worked. Though the exact web traffic to Momversation.com is not quantified, Momversation.com has an Alexa traffic ranking in the top 100,000 (currently at 43,899). It stands to reason that they have a decent number of page views per month, given that ranking and the fact that they have developed a reasonably active community and forums. But the fact that Momversation has embedded videos all over the web — including some heavily trafficked areas on the blogs of its member panelists — might serve to inflate those traffic ranks, since it seems that whenever an embedded video is loaded, this counts as a pageview on the main site.

I’m not big on video content, so I had to do some fishing around in order to understand the nitty gritty on Momversation’s video stats. At Mom 2.0, Rob Morhaim was asked about the reality of the video statistics for Momversation during a panel about using alternative forms of media in blogging. It seems that the video technology used for Momversation (as well as many other video sites) usually has some means of tracking views embedded in the player itself, but for some reason the Momversation numbers do not have these numbers readily available. To clear things up, Morhaim said that those embedded numbers are not used for Momversation because of its multi-seat promotion techniques — in short, that the numbers of views tracked by any one Momversation viewer would be inaccurate because it appears so many different places on the web, all at once. Morhaim did say that the Momversation oeuvre has easily topped twenty million views since its beginning in late 2008.

Twenty million views sounds like a lot to me, and it sounded like a lot to most of the people in the room at Mom 2.0. But as it turns out, twenty million views for a set of over two hundred videos spread out over a year and a half, while still respectable, is not as fantastic as it initially sounds. To give perspective, a video posted on a typical Dooce post (like one of her husband in the bath, say) can get anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 views tracked on its host video site (Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube). Make two hundred of those videos, and you’ve already got four million views, with no post-production, soundtracks or other big name bloggers contributing to the conversation or pimping it out on their blogs.

Still, Momversation makes money, and presumably generates a decent return on investment for its long-term corporate sponsor, Target. DECA TV also sells ads on the main site. Opportunities to advertise with Momversation, according to the DECA TV site, include “product placement, title sponsorship, micro-sites and reskins, display and interactive media, newsletters, content licensing, and revenue shares.” It’s not clear to what degree that these methods have been deployed within Momversation itself, since DECA TV also has replicated the Momversation model in various other sectors of the blogosphere including the “properties” Parents Ask (Momversation, only with actual parenting experts, psychologists, and pediatricians), Project Lore (Momversation for Gamers), Smosh (Momversation for Teens), Good Bite (Momversation for Food Bloggers), and Dog & Pony (Momversation for Start-ups, Tech Gurus, and Entertainment people).

DECA’s website states that their company’s purpose is to locate “pre-existing online communities or ‘tribes’ along with ‘tribal leaders’ . . . people who have emerged from the online rabble to become recognized leading voices in their vertical space” and then put together “properties that have video at their core, but capitalize on all the publishing and interactive capabilities the web has to offer.” They put out a high quality product, and have a smart approach to creating unusual content for the mommy blogosphere, even if I’m still not convinced that video is the right medium through which to communicate with this particular market sector. There are a lot of questions about Momversation in the blogosphere, though, concerning the way Momversation is produced, how the panelists are chosen, what kind of compensation is involved, and — particularly with the recent launch of BlissTV — the viability of video blogging as a means of commercializing blogs. Here’s my stab at delving into the issue further, for what it’s worth.

Where Does Momversation Appear And How Much Does It Cost?

Momversation has its own website, but the peculiar level of its success is due to its exposure across a ton of different platforms, including the personal blogs of all the panel members, as well as various placements in Hearst publications and on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Momversation appears in the content column of the panelists’ blogs — which in some cases is very valuable web real estate — as well as in the sidebars of some of the blogs of panelists. It is a safe assumption that Dooce (who featured the Momversation video as a fixture in her sidebar for several months) would have been paid a fee specifically for that purpose, since that amount of space on Dooce.com would have been selling for as much as $15,000 per week at that time. Dooce’s contract would have to include the fee for her appearance as well as some kind of clause for the space on her blog, though it appears that Momversation has since removed its ad on Dooce’s site. By contrast, the space on Giyen Kim’s sidebar is probably not billed out at the same rate, and I don’t know if the appearance of Momversation there is by contract or just the free choice of the blogger.

Because nobody is talking at Momversation. Not about salaries, not about anything.

That’s right, I was tacky and asked about money. I do these things for you guys. Because that’s what we want to know — how much are they getting paid for this gig, right?

I wrote to all of the Momversation panelists to see if they could give me ballpark numbers for the salaries they get for participating in Momversation. Several panelists wrote back, but they all explained that they had signed what one person referred to as a “pretty air-tight confidentiality and nondisclosure clause” that prevented them from talking about the specifics of their contracts. This is not surprising, since the people behind Momversation are Hollywood types who are used to the sensitivities surrounding discrepancies in talent salaries. Jessica Gottleib, a current Momversation panelist, did confide in me that she doesn’t “work cheap or silly,” and that she’s “very happy with [her] deal with Momversation.” This sentiment was echoed by another panelist, who said she loved working with them (DECA TV).

They have covered their bases, because nobody is willing to talk, even people who don’t work for them regularly, which means they must be getting paid a shit ton to participate in this deal. Of course, I had figured they must be well compensated, and I had still hoped to get some kind of ballpark numbers, but to no avail. I do have reason to believe that there is a flat fee paid to the participants, either by month or by week, per contract, and that each panelist has a set number of required appearances in the videos. I’m not sure that these requirements are the same across contracts, though, and besides, I cannot substantiate these claims, despite my best efforts at getting some more information. Here’s what Rob Morhaim had to say on the matter of salaries yesterday:

I’m sure it’s no surprise that all compensation questions are completely confidential. I cannot even give you a ballpark. I can tell you that everyone has agreed to and lives up to the terms of the same talent agreement.

TOTALLY UNSUBSTANTIATED CONJECTURE: Putting that statement through the lens of my highly specialized and scientific measuring tool, I surmise that, not only is there a discrepancy in the salaries paid to Momversation panelists, but the discrepancy must needs be so large that even a hypothetical ballpark number would betray the egregiousness of it all, viz. it’s got to be a crazy range, like a few hundred bucks per month for the lowest paid to like several thousand or even tens of thousands per month for the highest. Because if not, a ballpark wouldn’t matter much, right? Of course, sometimes these deals are so crazy careful that they just don’t ever tell you anything unless you’re on a need-to-know basis. But in my mind, the lack of a ballpark is telling. I’m just saying. End of totally unsubstantiated conjecture.

Here’s what I can tell you about hypothetical revenues associated with Momversation, though. When the Momversation project initially launched, it was running ads across the entirety of the BlogHer Ad Network, and spots for Momversation appeared several times here on ABDPBT before I eventually opted out of the campaign (only because they did not offer an option for having the video play only on demand, and I cannot countenance auto-play video — particularly with sound — no matter how high the CPM, it’s just too annoying). The CPM for those Momversation ads on BlogHer Ads at that point was about $12, which is on the higher end of rates for CPM on BlogHer Ads. To be pimping out a site at that rate — blanketing the network in spots at the time, in fact, if I recall correctly — there has to be some serious venture capital involved. Since Momversation is still going strong after a year and a half, I would guess that all parties, corporate and bloggers, are happy with the deal as it stands now. And that’s also probably why it’s so hard to find out anything about the nature of their deals.

How Do You Get On Momversation?

Rob Morhaim, the producer of Momversation and the guy that Heather Armstrong refers to as “our Bosley,” is a smart guy, and if you want to be on Momversation, it appears that the best way of doing so is to impress yourself upon him in some manner. Initially, the panelists for Momversation were chosen in a variety of ways: first, the project’s sponsor, Target, submitted a list of its “wants” for bloggers. At Mom 2.0, Morhaim told me this list was based mostly on traffic, but that Target also had required that the panelists meet certain demographics. After lining up some of the ideal bloggers on Target’s list, Morhaim went out himself and “found the voices” who would fill the other slots.

Strangely enough, most of those voices seem to have been listed on the pages of the Federated Media Parenting Federation page. Of the original panel of Momversation bloggers, there are three bloggers who were not represented by Federated Media at the time of their inclusion in Momversation; one of whom was Daphne Brogden, who is involved in another DECA-affiliated endeavor of undisclosed specifics (her blog, Cool Mom, is listed as one of DECA’s “properties.”). Giyen Kim, of Bacon Is My Enemy, uses BlogHerAds, but was featured on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop page for Mommy Bloggers at the time she was picked for Momversation and appeared on CNN.com several times for her weight loss video blogging, and this is presumably how she came to Morhaim’s attention.

The third non-Federated Media represented blogger is Rebecca Woolf, the inclusion of whom on the panel really doesn’t require explanation: she is a beloved blogger, gifted writer, glamour queen and a best-selling author, and much has been made of her ability to mix high fashion with stuff she finds at Target, so my guess would be that she was on Target’s original list of ideal bloggers for Momversation. Somebody else who was likely on that ideal list of bloggers is Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman, who confirmed that she declined the offer to participate in Momversation mostly due to the demands of her schedule at the time (she was trying to complete what would become her best-selling cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, Harper Collins, 2009), as well as some some uncertainty that the project would be the right fit for her.

The short answer to how you can get involved in Momversation is: you can’t. At least not for pay. Panelists are chosen by traffic and by their ability to meet demographics, and this appears unlikely to change. However, as more video experiments enter the blogosphere, there may be more opportunities to become part of this kind of gig, presuming this method of monetization is really generating the return on investment that is suggested by the scant statistics available for analysis.

How Much Control Does Target Have?

One of the big questions with Momversation has been how the various bloggers were chosen, and to what degree Target, the (seemingly permanent) sponsor of Momversation influenced these choices. I asked Rob Morhaim about the initial choice of bloggers for Momversation (see panelist roster and updates here), and he told me that Target had some bloggers in mind, and that these names had been generated based mostly on traffic numbers. In addition to their traffic-based wishlist, Target wanted to have certain demographics covered by the panelists, including different races and marital statuses. At Mom 2.0, I asked, if this “need to cover certain demographics” meant that they required certain specific races to be reprsented, and Morhaim said, “I would find a blog, and it wasn’t a highly trafficked-blog, but it represented Asian-Americans,” to which I interjected, “Or single mothers?” and he said, “Yes.”

Other than specifics of salaries, which nobody is giving me, the one thing I wanted to know about with Momversation was how much input Target had over the choice of discussion topics. This is mostly because the inclusion of Momversation as a blogging award contender in this year’s Bloggies seemed strange to me, even if various participants have claimed that yes, Momversation is a blog, and no, Target does not have editorial control over it. So I asked Morhaim about the role of Target in the choice of bloggers and content, and because our conversation became so difficult to splice into quotes that fit standard English conventions, I’m just going to put a transcript of it here and you can draw your own conclusions:

Anna: “But did [Target] ever go around to the individual blogs, and look at content, and then say, ‘We don’t want this person, because of XYZ, because they use bad language or something?”
Morhaim: “No. Never.”
Anna: “So, what is [Target's] relationship to the content of Momversation, then?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.” [Coupled with emphatic nodding.]
Anna: “Yes, but do they give you topics? Or do topics have to be run by them for approval first?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.”
Anna: “Are there certain topics that they won’t let you do?”
Morhaim: “Well, there have been times when we’ve gone to them and have said, ‘How about we do a topic on holiday shopping, but not holiday shopping at Target? Just shopping in general,’ and they’ll say ‘Yes.’”

Now, before you go saying that he didn’t answer my question there, reflect on the fact that he DID kind of answer it, because the fact that they went to Target with a topic at all, in any event, suggests that he is in the practice of going to Target to get a topic OK’d. See what I did there? There’s no way of knowing if the topics are micromanaged by Target on a regular basis, but there is a suggestion here that there may be some degree of editorial control over content made by a corporate entity, rather than the topics being an organic result of all these dynamic moms just chatting it up.

Conclusions: I Don’t Really Have Any Yet

The article I wanted to write about Momversation was going to tell you exactly how much people are being paid to participate, how much revenue it generates for the parent company, and how Target feels about its experience with the project. But my friends, I have failed in this. So the only question remaining for me is: how do you guys feel about Momversation? Do you think it works in our community? I have my own thoughts, but I think a more valuable way of discussing this method of monetiziation is to try to explore its efficacy in this market through the comment section here. I haven’t bought stuff more often at Target as a result of Momversation, personally — I already bought a ton of stuff there to begin with, for one thing, and also, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Momversation video from start to finish myself (except the one played at the panel at Mom 2.0) because personally, I don’t have any patience for video when I’m reading blogs. I like to read blogs, and I cannot stand the extra noise created by a video. When I want to watch TV, I watch TV. When I want to read blogs, I read blogs. Am I alone in this? What do you guys think?

COLLEGES

MEN'S BASKETBALL

FAR WEST

N. Arizona 73, SAC STATE 59

Portland St. 98, Idaho St. 63

Weber St. 85, E. Washington 57

MIDWEST

Butler 74, Valparaiso 69

SOUTH

Savannah St. 94, Carver Bible 68

EAST

Canisius 74, Loyola, Md. 62

Columbia 56, Penn 55

Cornell 50, Princeton 47

Fairfield 71, Iona 54

Harvard 91, Brown 71

Niagara 74, Manhattan 72

Siena 80, Rider 54

St. Peter's 62, Marist 39

Yale 55, Dartmouth 45

N. ARIZONA 73, SACRAMENTO ST. 59

N. ARIZONA (14-13)

Larson 2-6 0-0 4, Lepley 2-3 3-4 7, C. Jones 6-14 3-3 18, Rogers 6-12 6-6 20, Olubuyi 0-3 0-0 0, D. Jones 1-3 0-0 2, Saldivar 1-2 2-2 5, Wallace 1-3 0-0 3, Johannsen 4-4 6-6 14. Totals 23-50 20-21 73.

SACRAMENTO ST. (9-20)

Dickson 2-6 1-3 6, Eller 7-12 0-3 14, Stigall 0-2 0-0 0, Flaggs 5-9 0-0 12, Daniel 2-5 2-4 7, Toles-Bey 1-8 6-7 8, Selling 0-2 0-0 0, Bjegovic 4-8 2-3 12. Totals 21-52 11-20 59.

Halftime–Sacramento St. 27-26. 3-point goals–N. Arizona 7-16 (C. Jones 3-4, Rogers 2-6, Saldivar 1-1, Wallace 1-2, Larson 0-1, Olubuyi 0-1, D. Jones 0-1); Sacramento St. 6-18 (Bjegovic 2-4, Flaggs 2-5, Daniel 1-2, Dickson 1-2, Selling 0-1, Stigall 0-2, Toles-Bey 0-2). Fouled Out–None. Rebounds–N. Arizona 36 (Johannsen 11); Sacramento St. 27 (Daniel, Dickson, Eller 5). Assists–N. Arizona 13 (Rogers 5); Sacramento St. 15 (Toles-Bey 6). Total Fouls–N. Arizona 21; Sacramento St. 19. Technical–N. Arizona Bench. A–731.

WOMEN'S BASKETBALL

FAR WEST

E. Washington 70, Weber St. 56

Idaho St. 63, Portland St. 51

MIDWEST

Creighton 77, Drake 57

Indiana St. 70, N. Iowa 62

Missouri St. 83, S. Illinois 72

Wichita St. 68, Evansville 43

SOUTH

Duke 83, Virginia 65

Georgia Tech 64, North Carolina 57

N.C. Central 74, Longwood 66

EAST

Canisius 54, St. Peter's 40

Columbia 80, Penn 61

Fairfield 55, Niagara 41

Harvard 65, Brown 54

Loyola, Md. 45, Manhattan 41

Marist 82, Iona 80, OT

Princeton 96, Cornell 59

Richmond 78, George Washington 54

Siena 58, Rider 48

Yale 58, Dartmouth 42

BASEBALL

Peoria Showcase

NO. 25 KANSAS 4, SAC STATE 3

SAC STATE 8, GONZAGA 2

SOFTBALL

Cathedral City Classic

HAWAII 8, UC DAVIS 5

Hawaii (9-4) 015 001 1 – 8 9 1

UC Davis (6-4) 003 200 0 – 5 10 1

Ricketts, Rodriguez (3), Parnaby (5) and Grimes; Waldusky, Holmes (5) and Miller. Top hitters: UH–Majam 2x4, HR; Iwata 3x4, HR, 2 RBIs; Yoshikawa 2x3 2 RBIs. UCD–Holmes 3x4; Santana 2x3, HR, 2 RBIs; Guzman 2x2; Castillo 2 RBIs.

SOU Raider Invitational

WILLIAM JESSUP 6, SIMPSON 4

WILLIAM JESSUP 6, NORTHWEST CHRISTIAN 5

WOMEN'S TENNIS

UC SANTA BARBARA 5, UC DAVIS 2

Singles: 1. Stone, UCD, def. Lozano, UCSB, 7-5, 6-2. 2. Zamudio, UCD, def. Novak, UCSB, 6-0, 6-3. 3. Dockendorf, UCSB, def. Legaspi, UCD, 6-3, 6-2. 4. Gledden, UCSB, def. Curry, UCD, 6-3, 6-1. 5. Hausman, UCSB, def. Edles, UCD, 3-6, 6-4, 1-0 (10-7). 6. Ojeda, UCSB, def. Brady, UCD, 6-2, 6-1.

Doubles: 1. Dockendorf/Lozano, UCSB, def. Edles/Legaspi, UCD, 8-2. 2. Ojeda/Onaga, UCSB, def. Curry/Stone, UCD, 8-4. 3. Hausman/Novak, UCSB, def. Eades/Zamudio, UCD, 8-2.

NO. 47 SAC STATE 4, NO. 56 UC IRVINE 3

WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS

Team results: 1. San Jose State 194.550; 2. UC DAVIS 193.750; 3. SAC STATE 193.550.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES

WOMEN'S TENNIS>

FRESNO CITY 6, COSUMNES RIVER 3

Singles: McFeeters, FC, def. Greenhau, CR, 6-1, 6-0. Seifert, CR, def. Abston, FC, 5-7, 6-4, 7-5. Huynh, CR, def. Pereyea, FC, 6-2, 6-1. Cross, FC, def. H. Rose, CR, 6-2, 6-1. Boman, FC, def. E. Rose, CR, 6-0, 6-3. Keys, FC, def. Crawford, CR, 6-0, 6-0.

Doubles: Cross/McFeeters, FC, def. Greenhau/Seifert, CR, 7-5, 6-4. Huynh/H. Rose, CR, def. Keys/Jenny, FC, 7-5, 6-3. Mortin/Aceues, FC, def. Crawford/E. Rose, CR, 6-1, 6-4.

MEN'S TENNIS

FRESNO CITY 9, COSUMNES RIVER 0

Singles: Karlman, FC, def. Mireles, CR, 6-1, 6-1. Kolady, FC, def. Solari, CR, 6-0, 6-2. Hemmist, FC, def. Drummond, CR, 6-0, 6-0. Caudros, FC, def. Mukhtar, CR, 6-3, 6-3. Bernardes, FC, def. McNeal, CR, 6-0, 6-1. Gilbert, FC, def. Phu, CR, 6-1, 6-0.

Doubles: Sinitsyn/Kolady, FC, def. Mireles/Solari, CR, 6-1, 6-3. Hemmist/Karlman, FC, def. Drummond/Mukhtar, CR, 6-0, 6-2. Johnson/Calaway, FC, def. McNeal/Phu, CR, 6-2, 6-0.

 
Here is my account of the events that happened in my life on Thursday, February 25, 2010.

***No names have been changed to protect the innocent.***

 
This is my dressing room about 30 minutes after I arrived, bleary-eyed, at the Good Morning America studio early Thursday morning. You’ll notice I’ve already plugged in my curling iron, which I used to further fry my hair, and my computer, which I used to Tweet how much I was nervously sweating.

What I don’t have a photo of is what happened when I arrived 30 minutes earlier. The producer who met me at the door of the studio walked me back and showed me to my dressing room, which had a sign on which the name “Ree Drummond” (That’s me. I think.) was clearly printed. Then I walked into the room to find…Bill O’Reilly sitting on the chair. I was confused…befuddled…worlds were merging and crashing in on me and I suddenly wondered who and where I was. “Is this Fox?” I asked. The more lucid GMA producer assured me that no, this wasn’t Fox. Mr. O’Reilly has a segment on GMA in a bit, and he must have gotten the dressing rooms mixed up.

Mr O’Reilly immediately stood up and apologized. Then I apologized. Then he apologized. Then I said, “I’ll just switch rooms with you,” and he said, “No, I’ll go in the right room,” and then I said, “Are you really Bill O’Reilly?” and he left.

Then I just stood there, wondering what had happened and if it had all been a dream.

Then, when he went onto the set for his segment, I signed one of my cookbooks “Sorry I kicked you out of my dressing room, man!” and stuck it in his dressing room under his phone and eyeglasses. I kinda wanted to call Marlboro Man from his phone and say, “I’m calling from Bill O’Reilly’s phone,” but I decided that would be overstepping.

This whole encounter completely knocked my brain off its track, if it was even on a track to begin with, which it wasn’t. It was the perfect start to my day!

Inside Edition (snicker snicker): Bill O’Reilly is very quiet, very polite, very reserved, and very tall. And very slim. And well dressed, too.

And probably wondering what an obnoxious orange cookbook was doing in his dressing room when he returned from his segment.

 
 
I’d taken the liberty of bringing every top in my suitcase, and originally planned to wear the light taupe number with the black frilly/freaky design. I wound up wearing the teal blousy thing on the far left, though, which wound up making me look a little on the pregnant side, but I’m not necessarily trying to sell myself as Jillian Michaels, so all is well.

I’m more about the gravy than the awesome abductor muscles.

 
 
Then my editor Cassie showed up. She believed in me back when she probably shouldn’t have, and she has never once tried to edit out my weird freakishness.

I like that in an editor.

Not that I know any other editors, but still.

 
 
Around 7:30, I went downstairs to get a lay of the land (tables), which had been artfully arranged and prepared by…

 
 
Karen, an angel who helped corral and manage and prepare all the food.

 
 
She made my job so easy, I actually tried to buy her so I could take her back to the ranch with me. Oh, the things I could accomplish with Karen in my life!

Unfortunately, she declined my kind offer.

I only had ten bucks on me.

 
 
After awhile, it was time to go up to the set for some live shots, which they film as teasers before commercial breaks. Here, I’m talking to Maria the producer, whom I want to be when I grow up.

Except I think she’s quite a bit younger than me.

But still.

 
News Anchor JuJu Chang came over before my first live shot, just to say hi. She was beautiful. And I, in turn, responded by acting like The Fonz.

What am I doing in this photo? If anyone in Heaven or on Earth has the answer, please email it to me at your earliest convenience.

Thank you for your cooperation.

 
 
Then Robin Roberts, who can only be described as statuesque and resplendent, popped over to introduce herself.

 
 
Then she pointed to the various chuckwagons here and there and asked, “Are these hokey?”

I assured her that yes, they were, but that since I’m hokey, too…they’re the perfect fit!

 
 
Robin and George had some fun conversation…

I’ll cover George later. But let’s just say…

Never mind. I’ll cover George later.

 
 
JuJu and Sam Champion, the Weather Anchor, joined me for one of the teaser/live shots, then Sam grabbed one of the carrots out of my pot roast and ate it on the air.

“Sam grabbed one of the carrots out of my pot roast and ate it on the air…”

I’m just reporting the vital facts here, people. Just the facts. You can always depend on me for the most important news of the day.

At this point, the nervousness had really set in.

And speaking of reporting the important facts, I will admit that because of the thinness of the teal material of my blousy shirt, as a preventative measure I had carefully wadded up two paper towels and shoved one under both of my armpits. I didn’t want rings of fire on my lovely teal blouse, let alone on national TV. That would definitely have sullied what had been, so far, a remarkably fun experience.

The problem was, I kept getting called over to the table for live teaser shots before commercial breaks. Afraid I’d hold my arm up and knock one of them loose on the air, I had to remove the wadded paper towels each time they called me—and quickly enough to get over to the table, since I usually only had about fifteen seconds to get there each time.

The other problem was, I didn’t want to reach into my lovely teal blouse and remove two wadded up paper towels in front of the crew, the anchors, and the audience, who normally would be outside on the sidewalk but who’d been invited inside because of the snow. So I found what I started referring to as My Special Place, way behind one of the upright walls of the kitchen set. And I had to dart back there, remove the wads, and dart back out within fifteen seconds. My Special Place was my sanctuary.

The third time I darted back to My Special Place, however, a crew member—a tall man with a beard—was there. Having no other options, I said “I’m sorry, but…” and I yanked the wads from my shirt right in front of him.

Then he looked up at the ceiling and said, “I didn’t see anything!” and that made me sweat even more.

I’ll be seeking medical, spiritual, and psychological help for this malady.

And I’ll probably avoid sheer teal material on any future TV appearances.

 
Soon, minutes before my segment was to begin, the other table of food—which included individual plates for the anchors—was wheeled in.

 
 
Mmmm…pot roast. Me likey pot roast.

 
 
I’m getting ready to be on live national TV.

 
 
Dear Lord, please help me remember how to cook, because right now I can’t even remember what salt looks like.

 
 
Here, I’m cutting the string off of the roast and trying to remember my name.

Ray?

Ria?

Rachael?

Rashinda?

Raphael?

I know it’s an R name…just give me a minute…

It’s amazing the otherwise simple things that vacate your brain when you’re in a TV studio in New York City.

 
But then Robin appeared…

 
 
And made everything better.

I don’t know what it is about that woman…but she exudes calmness.

She exudes serenity…

She exudes that I need to get on the treadmill. Girlfriend is a slim and tall drink of water…and I mean that in the most respectful way.

 
 
Then George Stephanopoulos magically appeared. It surprised me for a second. I knew he was there on the set…but when I turned and saw him, I just thought, “Oh…Hi, George!”

Then I said, out loud, “Oh…Hi, George!”

No, I really did. Like he was my next door neighbor or something…if I even had any next door neighbors.

 
 
It was surreal to have such a vault of memories and images of George from the 1990’s, when he was a senior adviser to President Clinton…and to be standing there next to him talking about my pot roast.

And I’m just going to say it.

Because I’m a blogger. And bloggers say it.

He’s cute. He’s really, really cute.

But the attractiveness isn’t necessarily tangible—external beauty, as we all know, is a subjective thing. It’s more in his manner—he’s kind, approachable, genuine, and smiles a lot. And I can’t help but think that the contrast of his nineties persona—the serious, political George—helps catapult these personable qualities even more.

 
But what I really wanted to talk to him about was his wife, Schmoopie.

My favorite Seinfeld episode ever.

And now.

This would be a good place for me to tell you this:

 
Everyone at Good Morning America—from the key grip (what’s a key grip?) all the way to the anchors themselves—are incredibly warm and welcoming. While the set is clearly a well-oiled machine, it’s far from a frigid, all-business workplace. On the contrary, it’s like there’s a small sunshine hovering right inside the studio, beaming streams of teamwork and joy over all the bodies below. My two-hour experience at Good Morning America was more fun than I ever could have expected, and I left there smiling.

It really was a beautiful “Morning.”

Then I rushed to the airport, praying I didn’t get snowed in! And I didn’t.

And now I’m home with the cows.

The end.

Here’s the clip if you missed it:

Hummer is mostly dead, but last summer, we took two H3s and joined the Hummer Club on an expedition to Michigan's Drummond Island. One local woman grabbed my ass, but for the most part, the fun happened behind the wheel.

Last summer, we hit Drummond with man-about-Hummer PR guy Nick Richards and a couple of press-fleet H3s. We originally intended to run this story whenever Tengzhong and GM came to a sale agreement — sort of a "here's what the Chinese have gotten with their purchase" story — but then the deal was delayed. And delayed again. And delayed again. Now it's completely off, and GM claims that it's going to close Hummer down. Naturally, we discovered today that it still might return to peddling the brand to the highest bidder.

Considering that we just ran Hummer's obituary, we figured now was as good a time as any to get on with describing how wheeling SUVs on a remote island is fun as hell.

Drummond Island is a seriously nowhere piece of earth, a rock located off the tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the waters of Lake Huron. Since nature decided to have ice-age glaciers leave Drummond as a rough-edged outcrop, it has become a popular spot with the region's rockcrawling and off-roading enthusiasts. It offers an astounding and seemingly endless variety of terrain, from muddy cedar bogs to deep deciduous forests, rocky shelf routes, and high-speed trails. It's an excellent way to test the off-road prowess of anything on wheels.

We drove the six-and-a-half hours from GM's Milford Proving Ground to the Drummond Island Resort in a 2010 Hummer H3T Alpha that started the trip with 56 miles on the clock. We joined the Hummer PR team, who brought along a 2010 H3 Alpha and a sort of skunk-works H3 with a suspension kit.

It's easy to paint H3 owner with the broad brushstrokes of waste and limited off-road utility that apply to the H2 — after all, they look the same, right? Still, there's more under the surface. Once you leave the asphalt, the difference between the H3 and its older brothers becomes markedly clear. Where the H2 and H1 are off-road sledgehammers, the H3 is more of a pick-axe. It'll take you almost anywhere you want to go without much drama. It'll fit down tree-lined paths designed for Jeep Wranglers where bigger trucks mash vegetation and bend fenders. Thankfully, some of Drummond's trails are off-limits to the big boys; this blessing allowed us time to feel out the locking front differential and practice our spotting.

We also had the good fortune to hit Drummond during a rainy spell. The low-lying island was flooded in places, and some of the two-track trails had turned into highly satisfying, rocky-bottomed bogs. Two-wheel drive was good enough for a lot of what we encountered, but four-high made the slippery stuff passable. The locking diff and four low is reserved for situations where things get vertical; get the system set right and air down the tires, and you can climb over darn near anything. Feel free to drag the thing over a rocky outcrop, too — it's got full underbody armor which handles the protection racket quite nicely. (We tested it. A lot.) You just have to be sure to close the sunroof when bombing through the deep puddles. (Not that we would know anything about that.)

Those same rains that provided us with entertaining mud also ensured hanging out around the campfire at night wasn't very fun. When you've got a bunch of folks doing manly stuff like off-roading, you need a place to go and tell lies at the end of the day. Given the weather, we ended up at the Northwood bar, a loud and boisterous joint with a great jukebox and cheap libations.

This is where it got weird. As the night wore on and the lies got bigger, I eventually had to rid myself of some rented beer. On my return from the restroom, I passed a table full of local ladies having a grand old time. In full view of everyone I was with, one of them reached out and grabbed a handful of my ass. Puzzled, I kept walking without looking back. The entire table erupted into laughter, and discussions of Hummer's future were killed for the rest of the evening.

No matter what anyone says, we're at the end of Hummer's days. Even if the brand gets purchased and saved from the axe, it will never again be the big, burly, GM-backed leviathan it once was. During its brief stint in history, it pretty much played a game of grab-ass with image and ego, and that's what eventually sunk the ship. I walked away from my homely suitor that evening, and it seems that America will soon be doing the same for Hummer. Still, while it lasted, it was entertaining.

At Mom 2.0, I asked Heather Armstrong if she saw the kind of multimedia expansion she’s currently doing with HGTV as being the future of blogging. Her response was to say that she felt that her move to HGTV was an “expansion of the platform,” and she did not elaborate beyond that on whether she thought that this was the kind of thing that would be happening with more and more bloggers as time passed.

As much as I would have liked a more in-depth answer to work with, I think that this is probably the smartest way of answering that question, because the truth is, asking if other bloggers will be able to build their own brands to the extent that she has is like asking if any extra in a film is going to be able to pull off building an A-list acting career, as well as a production company on the scale of Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

Or something like that.

Because who the hell knows? Nobody on the web at present has the kind of crossover opportunity that Dooce does, except perhaps Ree Drummond (of Pioneer Woman). That includes all the big male web celebrities like Seth Godin, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, and whatever other SXSW regulars you feel like including in that mix. In terms of media appearances, they are small potatoes when compared to Dooce: they don’t get put on Time’s lists, they don’t get on Oprah, they don’t have multi-billion dollar conglomerates banking on building their web presence around their popularity. Even within the mommyblogosphere, where there is decidedly less hero-worship of Dooce, the number one search term on blogs with search widgets is Dooce. And while I’m sure this annoys people beyond belief, it also gives them traffic.

It would be impossible to say if expansion to TV is where bloggers are going, because, well — are any other bloggers going to where Dooce is going?

Context Happens

As part of her deal for content collaboration with HGTV, Heather Armstrong is writing weekly on the Design Happens blog at HGTV. Her first post went up on the evening of February 25, 2010. In short, the post documents how Dooce’s design choices are not always practical, using her choice of putting decorative butterflies (projectile butterflies) on the wall of her newborn’s room did not turn out to be the best of choices, because her second daughter, Marlo, is far more fidgety than her first child, who would never have grabbed something off the wall in this manner. In short, she ended up having to remove all of the butterflies because having projectile butterflies around a changing table is not a practical choice for a newborn’s room.

The post is pretty typical Dooce fare — take an everyday dilemma and make it funny by juxtaposing Heather Armstrong’s legendary perfectionist tendencies with the chaos of a life with young children, mix in a pinch of hyperbole, season with a few expertly processed pictures and a well-placed reference to the enduring practicality of Jon (her husband) and bake for 1000 words. The post deliberately begins with a design dilemma, which is of course part of the effort to meet the constraints of the Design Happens blog on HGTV.com, and presumably, the post is free from any kind of expletives as a result of its context on HGTV.com as well, though the title of the blog itself, Design Happens, is a pretty decent fit to the Dooce brand, even if it’s cleaned up, because by reference to a well-worn phrase, “shit happens,” HGTV has managed to capture the kind of edginess for which Dooce is known, even without the explicit use of a word that might be objectionable to the middle Americans in their audience.

The Design Happens Dooce might be cleaned up and more restrained, but there’s no question that it is Dooce. And, as far as I can tell, her post matches HGTV’s intention for the blog, which is to “[not] let bad design happen to your home!” by allowing “The HGTV team [to share] design inspiration to help you on your way to design victory.”

But what is fascinating about the post is not so much its content, but the different feeling one gets from reading it — the overall experience of reading it, that is — when removed from the experience of Dooce.com. The Design Happens blog is smaller than Dooce, more corporate, less visually appealing. And while they might be allowing Dooce to use some (corporately approved) pictures, they don’t let her present them in the full glory as they appear on Dooce.com, where even pictures that appear smaller are linked to huge, glossy versions of their originals — the kinds of pictures that make your mouth water, or want to crawl up inside of them with a good book, and buy all of the products depicted within them immediately.

On Design Happens, these are pictures of any old house, or any old newborn’s room with ill-advised wall projectiles. I suppose this blog is meant to funnel people to HGTV for the more deluxe content, but if Dooce is in charge of “convergence,” I have to wonder why they aren’t letting her do what she does best?

But I haven’t even got to the most interesting part yet.

The community engagement is the astonishing part. Bear in mind that Dooce gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments on her posts at Dooce.com. As of the time that I started writing this post this morning, Heather Armstrong’s post at Design Happens had 21 comments, which is not too shabby of a number of comments for a typical blogger like, say, oh, me. But I would imagine it felt a little strange for Dooce to have so few comments. And more disturbing was that, after the first few supportive or “I’ve been there!” kind of comments, the chorus of Dooce detractors take over the comment section, as they often do, whenever Dooce does anything on the internet. But what’s odd here is that the smaller number of comments make these Dooce detractors appear to be far more powerful and significant here than they do on Dooce.com — possibly far more significant and powerful than they actually are, actually. And to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how powerful they actually are, because so much of what happens on the web and how power and money is allotted has to do with illusion.

The illusion, after twenty one comments, was that Dooce was not a good choice for HGTV. In fact, it was so overwhelming that I — of all people — felt compelled to leave a comment about the design technique depicted in the post. My comment, if not explicitly supportive of Dooce, was at least constructive and not detracting from the message of her post, and served to further the conversation (I thought) and downplay the significance of the other comments like

So is your point, hi I’m Heather, I have no common sense myself so let me tell you how to make dumb parenting design choices too? I just doing get it.

or

Is this point of this post supposed to be, “Be ye not so silly or stupid?” If it’s not, I can’t really figure out what the point is. Although, with some certainty in my opinion, I can tell you that it is not funny nor remotely interesting. Epic Fail HGTV.

or

WHO are you?

or

Heather you had like 400+ comments telling you what a bad idea this was. Oh but you knew better! We don’t have a design show, but it didn’t take much common sense just good parenting to know, that the flowers above her changing table were a horrible idea. Just like the pictures above her crib.

HGTV this is not your voice, this is just awkward This entry should have been something Heather put on her website, because no where in here is decoration advice. Just Dooce doing what she does…whine and defect.

I’m not sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it has something to do with this: on Dooce.com, I don’t really pay attention to the people who detract, because there are so many supporters, and the whole Dooce brand appears so powerful, there’s no reason to feel bad for her. But in a new context, Dooce is a beginner of sorts — she’s got a new set of people to contend with, and yet she’s still getting beaten up like she’s the pro that everyone wants to bring back down to their level.

It’s funny what context can do.

As I kept writing, I noticed that Dooce came in and commented on the Design Happens blog, something she rarely (if ever) does on the comments for her own posts on Dooce.com. So my guess is the effect was not lost on her, either — bloggers who are starting out always comment back and forth in their comment section, and they find it hard not to comment when somebody shows up to say something negative. In a way, Dooce is back to her roots.

I cannot wait to see what happens next.

Over the next month, HuffPost Books will be rolling out a series of excerpts from Part One of Keith Thomson's debut novel, "Once a Spy." Read Thomson's introductory blog, "What Happens to a Spy with Alzheimer's?" here. Below are chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7. If you missed chapters 1, 2, and 3, you can read them here. Come back next week for chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11. Check out Keith Thomson's website for more information on the new book.

4

"My name is John Lewis," the man said with certainty. He'd been just as certain a minute ago that he was Bill Peterson.

"Do you know where you live?" Helen asked.

The man shrugged.

"Do you know where you are now?"

"Geneva?"

"The town in upstate New York?"

"Don't know it."

Despite two sweaters, social worker Helen Mayfield sat huddled against her tiny desk at Brooklyn's Prospect Park Senior Outreach Center; at least the piles of folders full of lost causes provided a buffer against the draft. And the draft was no bother compared to the square dance class. The wall between her office and the rec room was so thin, it felt like the dance caller was hollering directly into her ear.

Not unrelated was the migraine, like a railroad spike through the base of her skull and into her left eye. Then there was the pharmacy three blocks away, where she might obtain a remedy. Closed December 25, sure. But also today, December 26.

For St. Stephen's Day!

She could help the man sitting at her desk, though. So everything else was relegated to minor annoyance.

He looked to be in his early sixties. Five-ten or eleven, weight about right, plain features. He had a moderate amount of white hair and an average amount of wrinkles and spots. His muscles were firm, but not so much that anyone would notice, except on close inspection. He'd spent the night here after volunteers in a Meals on Wheels van spotted him wandering Brooklyn yesterday afternoon in just the flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers he still wore. He had no wallet, no watch or jewelry, no identifying marks. And then there was his accent, or, really, the lack of one. He could be anyone from anywhere.

Still, Helen wasn't without clues. Each year the center cared for more seniors with neurodegenerative conditions than a neurologist typically saw in a career. Although he was relatively young, she suspected her John Doe had Alzheimer's. Its trademark was damage to the memory-retrieval process, manifested by a veil over the past and present. Symp¬toms also included humming and rocking without self- awareness. Mr. Doe: all of the above.

And the wandering was a classic. Alzheimer's caused minimal motor impairment. Ten years from onset, patients could tie a tie, bake a cake, even create a Web site. Driving a car was nothing for them. Except now and again, they departed for the corner store, only to be found halfway across the country. Such spells of disorientation often were prompted by unfamiliar surroundings. Out-of- towners visiting relatives frequently wound up as Does.

"Do you, by chance, have family in the New York City area?" she asked.

The humming ceased. The man sat ramrod straight. "Yes, ma'am. My son, Charles. Three-oh-five East Tenth Street in Manhattan, unless he's had difficulty making the rent again."

A few keystrokes at the social services database, and her computer screen filled with the driver's license data and a photograph of Charles Jefferson Clark of 305 East 10 Street. He was a year and a day older than she, five eleven and 170, with strong features and playful blue eyes that shone through scruff and tangles of sandy hair. In that shabby Yonkers Raceway T-shirt, she thought, he could be a rock star who dressed in defiant opposition to his means.

5

Feeling flush already, Charlie took a taxi to Aqueduct, stopping first at a Lightning ¢a$h. Into the gulley at window B, he dropped his driver's license and the key ingredient of his Great Aunt Edith wager: three Social Security checks made out to his mother, Isadora VanDeuersen Clark, each in the amount of $1,712.00. In a wispy cursive he imagined old-lady-like, he'd endorsed them, "Isadora V. Clark."

The first check had appeared in his mailbox in October, after what would have been her sixty-fifth birthday. If she hadn't died twenty-six years earlier. His horseplayer cronies were unanimous in the opinion that it was literally a gift horse. Still, he leaned toward notifying the Social Security Administration of the error. Until today.

Lightning ¢a$h looked and smelled like it was never mopped and never would be. The appeal was it accepted any check issued by the United States government without calling for verification; and the tellers paid so little attention to detail, they were likely to cash a check issued by the Confederate States of America. Usually.

It occurred to Charlie now that, given the run of luck he'd been on, today was the day the tellers would be replaced by undercover agents looking to bust deadbeats who cash their dead moms' Social Security checks.

Sure enough, the teller--a trim, middle-aged man with a self-assured air--licked his thumb and forefinger to enhance their adhesiveness, raised one of the checks to his lenses, and began to examine it.

Charlie tried to blink the horror out of his eyes. "My mom endorsed them to me."

The man muttered something in reply that sounded like "Yes, sir" but just as easily could have been a dubious "Yeah, sure." And continued his examination.

Hot acid jetted into Charlie's intestines.

An eternity passed.

Finally the teller opened his cash drawer and withdrew $5,058.96, the value of the checks minus Lightning ¢a$h's 1.5 percent fee. Charlie's acid ebbed and cool relief flowed in its place. The relief was mitigated by that blend of probability and superstition unique to horseplayers: You don't want to be lucky before the starting gate opens. It's that much less luck you'll have when you need it.

The sky above the Big A grandstand was an ominous, scowling gray. It would have taken a meteor shower to divert Charlie's attention from the oval. From the moment the stall doors banged open, Edith was a bullet. She finished five lengths ahead of the favorite. But two lengths behind a nothing chestnut named Hay Diddle, who won going away.

"There's a reason you never hear of anyone getting rich at the track," Charlie said to no one in particular as he crumpled his ticket. He left feeling heavier by a hundred pounds, the bulk of it melancholy and foreboding. On the stairs he used the handrail, the first time he could remember doing so, to counter the dizziness.

As the Q11 bounced him through potholes and back to Manhattan, the squeaky suspension sounded as if it were reiterating his exact thought: Now what?

He fantasized about staying aboard all the way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and from there skipping town on the first Greyhound to Montana or South Dakota or someplace like that. He'd clear the damned horses from his head once and for all, then find steady employment, maybe go back to school at night and finish his college degree. Then he'd meet "her" and they'd buy the two- story brick colonial with a tidy lawn that had room for a swing set and sandbox. And he'd find a thrill less risky than the horses. Like skydiving.

Running now would only make things worse though. Grudzev's men would bring the sand to one of Charlie's friends.

Also, Charlie had tried fresh starts. Several times after a big score, he'd hopped a taxi straight to LaGuardia. But the Daily Racing Form was everywhere--once even at a beachside newsstand consisting of a milk crate nailed to a coconut palm. He developed a theory that money won at the track, like water to the ocean, found its way back to the track. Or, put another way: A gambler doesn't make the same mistake twice. It's usually nine or ten times.

His cell phone's ring ended his rumination. The readout flashed a number he didn't know, but the area code was 718.

Almost surely it was the Christmas Call.

As if today couldn't get any better.

The holiday had been yesterday, but his father traditionally didn't remember Charlie's birthday until days afterward. If at all. Charlie used to go see him on the big holidays, at places that could get them fed and out in under an hour, with televised ball games to minimize conversation. The last couple of years, it had dwindled to just the calls.

The old man had some means; he could bail Charlie out of the Grudzev thing without much hassle on his end.

Writing Santa would be a better bet, Charlie thought.

Reflected in the window across the aisle was a face so cross that, for a moment, he didn't recognize himself.

He let the phone keep ringing.

Walking to his apartment, where rent had been due a week ago, Charlie saw a Cadillac Eldorado idling in the handicapped spot. Sitting at the wheel was Karpenko. Forged in a part of Russia where men killed one another over as little as a dirty look, Karpenko was hardened well beyond his age of thirty-five. Word was he once shot a man just to make sure his gun was working. One look at him, at all his muscles and his sharp black goatee, and anybody would think, Satan on steroids. He had on a high- collared black leather overcoat, which actually made him less menacing; Charlie had seen Karpenko in warmer weather, when he'd worn just a tank top, displaying crudely rendered dragons and skeletons and other gulag tattoos.

Karpenko served as muscle for the man beside him, Leo Grudzev, a jack-of-all- criminal-trades whose favorites were small arms and narcotics trafficking and shylocking--his preferred term for high- interest moneylending. Not that Grudzev needed muscle. The forty-year-old's keg of a torso was joined to a proportionately sized head by a neck that would have been indiscernible if not for the thick gold chain and gold cross the size of a railroad spike. He had a sour face that jutted forward like a ski slope. Charlie thought of Grudzev as evidence anthropologists were wrong--Cro- Magnon man hadn't died out. Were Charlie to voice that, Grudzev probably would shoot him. If Karpenko didn't shoot first.

Charlie steeled himself as he approached. Behind the steel were bones and tissue that fear had turned to putty. Grudzev's window rolled down. Charlie was belted by musky cologne and garlic.

"Belated Merry Christmas," Charlie said.

"Same for you," said Grudzev through a thick Russian accent, "if ..."

Karpenko reached into his coat, probably for a weapon. The glint in his eye alone caused Charlie's heart to jump.

Until Charlie hit upon a possible solution. "I have a plan to pay you by tomorrow with an extra five K on top," he said to Grudzev. "And if I don't, I'll go down to Brighton Beach and eat every grain of sand there."

Grudzev exchanged a shrug with Karpenko, then looked back at Charlie. "This plan better no got to do with a fucking horse."

6

The Prospect Park Senior Outreach Center was done in so many cheery pastels that the overall effect was depressing, the way a clown can be. The liniment in the air didn't help. Prior to pleading with Grudzev for a one-day extension, Charlie had listened to Helen's voice mail message, called her back, and gotten the rundown. If it hadn't included "durable power of attorney"--which would allow him to administer his father's finances--he almost certainly wouldn't be here now.

He almost didn't recognize the man hunched on the couch across the lobby. Usually Drummond sat straighter than most flagpoles, a function of rectitude as much as posture. His hair threw Charlie too. Charlie had correctly anticipated that, in the time since he'd seen him last, it would have turned fully white. The shocker was that it was unruly; Drummond used to keep it close-cropped, and practically regimented, by a standing weekly appointment at the barbershop.

The pajamas also surprised Charlie--not so much because of the incongruity of pajamas in a public place but because he simply couldn't remember having seen his father in nightclothes before. When Charlie used to get up for school, no matter how early, Drummond was gone. Often, the faint scent of talc was the only evidence he'd come home from the office the night before. More often, he was out of town, singing the praises of his beloved washers and dryers.

"Hey," Charlie said.

Drummond looked up, and Charlie saw the biggest change in him. His eyes had always been clear, sober, and sharp. Now they were the eyes of a man gazing into deep space and without a flicker of recognition.

"Dad, it's me," Charlie said.

"Oh," Drummond said pleasantly but without familiarity. "Hello."

Charlie felt as if an icy finger ran up his spine. "Charles," he tried.

Drummond looked him over, his eyes settling on the Meadowlands Racetrack logo on the sweatshirt peeking out of Charlie's jacket. Charlie wondered if, subconsciously, he'd put on the sweatshirt to provoke the old man. Although Drummond dabbled in the horses, the track had been their undoing, specifically when Charlie wound up at the Big A instead of staying at Brown for his sophomore year. There was a track axiom Charlie thought perfectly summed up Drummond's censure: "The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling."

Charlie decided now that the sweatshirt was merely a function of probability--a third of his wardrobe was racetrack giveaways.

"Charles!" Drummond exclaimed, as if aware of his presence for the first time. "What are you doing here?"

"Helen called--"

"The social worker?"

"She thought I ought to come pick you--"

"I see. Completely unnecessary."

"She said that you--"

"No, no, I'm fine. Completely fine."

"That's not what--"

"It's nothing you need to concern yourself with. Also, you should be in school."

Charlie was given pause. "You don't mean Brown, do you?"

"Clara Barton," Drummond said as if the question were inane.

"I graduated from Clara Barton twelve years ago."

Drummond rubbed his eyes. The vacancy remained.

"Oh," he said.

7

Helen Mayfield could turn heads, Charlie thought. But she was about something else. Her sunny blond hair was styled to be no maintenance. She wore a smart suit, obviously plucked off a rack, though, and not tailored in any of several ways that would have played up her figure. Her face was pale yet only cursorily made up. She was fully focused on helping others, he decided, and while not a practitioner himself, he admired it. Unfortunately, he thought, she was out of his league. And out of the league above that one too.

While Drummond dozed in a chair out in the hallway, Charlie and Helen sat at her desk, trying to talk above the Seniorobics class next door.

"Alzheimer's sufferers your father's age are a rarity," she said in a tone that was at once professional and compassionate. "Those his age already exhibiting his range of symptoms are statistically nonexistent. It's simply unfair."

She appeared to study Charlie to determine whether he needed a fortifying hand or a hug. He felt no worse than if Drummond were a stranger--some pangs but nothing that would trouble him tomorrow. Maybe it was denial. Maybe something was wrong with him. Maybe it was just the way things were. He lowered his eyes only because it seemed appropriate.

"So I guess a couple of aspirin isn't going to do the trick here," he said.

She smiled. "There are a number of Alzheimer's medications. Sadly, the best only slow cognitive decline, when they work at all. The neurologist will fill you in."

"What's a good-case scenario--if there even is one?"

"You might get lucky with donepezil or galantamine. Also you can expect some episodes of lucidity at random--sometimes five or ten minutes long, occasionally several hours. Still, the overall scheme of things is like child development in reverse. He's going to need full-time supervision now. I imagine you're too busy with your life to be his caregiver?"

"Something like that."

"What about other family?"

"They won't be much help. None of them are still alive."

She laughed, seemingly despite herself. "In that case, assisted living is probably the best option. It's not easy to find a suitable facility, in terms of the quality and quantity of staff, among other criteria. I'd be glad to help you."

"I'd appreciate that," he said, thinking of the time he'd get to spend with her. Left to his own devices, his criteria would be that the nursing home smell wasn't too bad and that his father could foot the bill. After Grudzev got his cut.

"Do you drink beer?" she asked.

He considered his response. Did she smell the Big A on him? Were his eyes bloodshot? Had she otherwise pegged him as a resident of Fringeville, meriting a call to the Durable Power of Attorney Department with a recommendation that they ink up the big rubber Hell No stamp?

"Sometimes," he said.

"Same. When we go over facilities, maybe we could have a beer?"

Charlie couldn't calculate the odds of this turn. He reined in his jack-o'- lantern grin lest it cause her to reconsider. "Maybe we could each have a beer?" he said.

From the sidewalk across the street, Dewart aimed a surveyor's level at the Prospect Park Senior Outreach Center. Most of his face was masked by the raised collar of his Dept. of Housing parka, along with his sunglasses, hat, and earmuffs. If someone still recognized him as one of the grad students rooming nearby, he had a story ready: He was moonlighting as a building surveyor to help with tuition.

The surveyor's level concealed a laser microphone. Directed at a second floor window, it measured vibrations in the pane and electronically converted them to the son's conversation with the social worker. The good news: Drummond had been located.

Hoping to ascertain that Drummond's disappearance had been benign, Dewart listened to the conversation through headphones con¬cealed by his earmuffs--or rather, he tried to. Despite filtration software designed to eliminate ambient noise, he couldn't differentiate their words from the disco music blaring from the room next to her office.

Sail-World was out on the water each race day, off Valencia, along with young Finn Drummond, an outstanding sailor in his won right, whose father, Mike, was Design Director for BMW Oracle Racing. Finn

We understand many people in Europe are unnerved by Google (GOOG), and sometimes we even sympathize. Citing its history of despotism and surveillance, Greece has outlawed Street View. Swiss officials have threatened to do the same, citing their country's history of ... um, government ministers getting photographed walking down the street with young women who aren't their wives. The United Kingdom briefly considered killing Street View for accidentally publishing photographs of men patronizing sex shops. Privacy: People care about it. We get it.

But the news that's come out of Italy today is totally unacceptable. In 2006, a few nasty teenagers in Turin beat and taunted a younger autistic boy, filmed their act, and posted the flick on YouTube. When Italian police notified Google of the offensive film, company officials removed it. Millions of flicks are posted on YouTube; many are unpleasant and graphically violent. The company has sometimes been cavalier about its responsibility for overseeing the site, as Viacom's copyright infringement complaint will attest. But the company responded within hours of being notified, and that's probably the best it could do.

Google's best wasn't good enough for Italian prosecutors, who brought a criminal case against the company's general counsel David Drummond, legal privacy expert Peter Fleischer, former CFO George Reyes, and senior product marketing manager Arvin Desikand. That's right: The Italian authorities charged Google's head bookkeeper with a criminal offense, punishable by actual prison time, for something a few bullying teenagers did in Turin.

Today, the judge in the case found Drummond, Fleischer, and Reyes guilty of violating the autistic boy's privacy and sentenced them in absentia to six months in prison. He also promptly suspended the sentence, as if this made him look like a reasonable fellow.

Google immediately denounced the verdict. Here's what Google lawyer Matt Sucherman had to say about it:

We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them—every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video—then the Web as we know it will cease to exist.

Just so. It's not just that Italy criminally prosecuted employees of a video hosting site even after they acted in good faith and removed the video. It's not just that they went after employees whose official responsibilities don't even include monitoring the site. (Prosecuting the marketing guy? Please.) It's that in the time you took to read this post, dozens of Italian assholes have posted onto YouTube a video of someone without his or her consent or knowledge. Under Italian law, Google just committed a few dozen criminal offenses. Who's next in the dock?

Italy's criminal prosecutors already have a terrible reputation, from deliberately using the press to poison the jury pool to not particularly caring who they charge, as long as it looks like they're doing their job. With this latest disgrace, they've embarrassed themselves and thrown into question whether the most modern, sophisticated, and lucrative industry on earth can function in their country.

Back in 2006, a group of Italian teenagers filmed a video as they assaulted another teenager who had downs syndrome. They uploaded the film to Youtube, where it was pulled only after topping the most viewed list and stirring up a national outrage in Italy a full two months later. Viva Downs, an Italian Down Syndrome support group, argued that the video should never have appeared in the first place and filed a complaint. Today the judge found chief legal officer David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former CFO George Reyes guilty of privacy violations and they received suspended six-month jail sentences.

Google Italy execs convicted over bullying video

The video, which was uploaded to Google Video in 2006, showed four teenagers beating and insulting a 17-year-old disabled student infront of about a dozen bystanders in Turin.
Google Italy, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the clip nearly two months later but not before the video caused a national outrage.
None of the executives were involved in the production or uploading of the video, but prosecutors argued that as it had topped a most-viewed list it should have been noticed sooner.

Italian verdict on Google privacy sets dangerous precedent

The decision is sure to affect all manner of Internet companies, not just Google. Italian law says that Internet service providers are not liable for content posted by users, but Internet content providers are a different story—they are responsible for the things they "publish." Google had argued that it falls into the former category, but Judge Oscar Magi disagreed.

The Google blog calls it "A serious threat to the web in Italy"

.....If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

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