house of the hanged man - Google’s Web Accelerator in the BuzzMachine (from: PubSub: Scoble)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HouseOfTheHangedManRSS2?m=161
Weblog: house of the hanged manSource: Google’s Web Accelerator in the BuzzMachine
Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HouseOfTheHangedManRSS2?m=161
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Google is repeating one of the great sins of AOL, promising to “accelerate” the web by caching — that is, copying and storing — web pages to serve to you.
You know, I’m beginning to think that Dave Winer and Robert Scoble were a little bit right in their points of view regarding Google and the autolink feature, especially Dave’s comments about a line that must not be crossed. Admittedly Dave was talking about a line in terms of content modification, but I think there’s also a line that should not be crossed in terms of privacy, and I think that Google has potentially stepped across both with this offering.
Not only would they collect tons of data that I don’t want them to have (should I install the accelerator), but they will also be serving my content from their servers, with Google deciding when there’s been enough of a change to my content that they should update their cache. That takes control over the content both from the users and the publishers, something that autolink didn’t do.
My view of the autolink controversy at the time was that it was a instance of the “slippery slope fallacy”, imagining a future that we had little reason to suspect at the time. I think that Google may have taken the next step down this slippery slope with GWA, and I for one am ready to call them on it. And I can’t help but wonder if I’d feel the same way if Google hadn’t opened the door with Autolink, or if I’d feel as strongly if they had listened a little and modified their Autolink behavior to make it a little more friendly to content producers like Dave and Robert. Interestingly enough, there’s been little comment from either Robert or Dave on the subject, although Cory Doctorow, an autolink apologist, comments on it as an anonymizing proxy (or not).
In the post I linked to above, Jeff Jarvis links to a bunch of commentary about the new “feature” that I won’t relink to, except to point to Fantomas’s fantomTip to block Google’s access which I may apply on my sites (the only drawback being that it’ll be almost impossible to keep up with the IP addresses of the GWA machines). Feedster shows some other discussion, and Technorati does as well (but Bloglines interestingly shows very little). All in all I think Jeff goes a little over the top in his post, but I agree with his bottom line, that I don’t trust Google with the information they’d be collecting here, and I don’t trust them with my content.