As you may have seen, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported the Google has banned its representatives from speaking with reporters from CNet News.com for a period of one year, on the heels of a CNet article that used Google CEO Eric Schmidt as a example of the extent and type of personal information that can be found using Google itself.
Now, News.com sister publication ZDNet UK has issued a scathing…well, I guess you could call it an “apology”…for the actions of News.com. From ZDNet UK:
“Acting under the mistaken impression that Google’s search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable.
Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern.”
As Jay writes, blogs are the little First Amendment machines that could. Although in the case above there were two organizations of substantial size involved, the same voice and reach are available across the board to all (ref: let’s do a search on, say, “horrible service”) and it becomes quickly apparent that the mean time to worldwide visibility of an issue can be literally measured in minutes — from incident, to impact, to (in this case) snarky response.
Others talking:
Alan Wexelblat at Corante
Matt Marshall at SiliconBeat
John Battelle at Searchblog
Dan Gillmor at Bayosphere