Pete from Rasterweb stopped by a little while ago to gingerly rattle my cage for this comment: “It’s unethical for anybody on any website to break the rules of another website.”

Say what!? That’s insane! So if I have a rule on my website that says if you ever mention my name you have to pay me $100, will you follow it? Google does not rule the web, but if they want to, they can certainly choose not to index wordpress.org or any other site. They do it all the time anyway.

Isn’t it odd when someone goes off on a single sentence and seemingly disregards the other hundreds of words surrounding it? It’s even worse when they don’t link the quoted comment (this didn’t happen in Pete’s case, BTW, I’m just talking generally). This type of fixation happens all the time in the blogosphere, mainstream media, radio, TV, etc. Online or off it doesn’t matter. If you quote somebody for pete’s sake, pardon the pun, please make sure that you always attribute the source — link to them. If you want to slap that godawful, stupid rel=’nofollow’ tag on them, then so be it, but at least help your readers out by indicating that there’s always more to the story.

I’ve surely been guilty of this myself, so I’m not going to be all hypocritical high and mighty or anything here. It’s just way too easy to do when blogging. I try to link all quotes and give proper context but sometimes in the interest of time and brevity, I admit I’m sloppy.

So, in total fairness, one should take my quote above in complete context (again, something that bloggers are notoriously sloppy about doing). I can pull a quote out of just about anybody’s blog out there and spin it a dozen different ways. Context is sooooo important.

A better word to describe the total ignoring of another website’s guidelines or rules that you are benefitting from would be “disrespectful” if used in a general sense, but I wasn’t using that quote in a general sense above, I was talking about a very specific situation: Wordpress using a section of its website for articles and doing so without full disclosure to the rest of the open source WP community.

Perhaps my words were vindicated though, because Google apparently agreed with those of us who disliked what was done and has already remedied this by removing these suspect articles from their index. That’s the comment I read anyway, I didn’t verifty that this was actually done. Wow, if so, then they move fast on this kind of thing. If this is true, then this is even more evidence that Google doesn’t like their search engine getting muddied up with intentionally engineered results like this. Why should any other webmaster or user bother to care about this kind of thing?

1) I use Google’s search engine regularly. It’s a tool for business and personal for helping me save time finding what’s relevant. Every bogus search listing result, just muddies up the legitimate results! Now we could definitely debate that those articles — which were produced at sweatshop labor from what I’ve read — were indeed related articles. That’s a pretty subjective thing but I will say that if I go searching for something Wordpress related (and I’ve been doing that a lot lately, it seems) that I’d be annoyed to find asbestos articles mixed in there (which I never found, anyway).
2) If Google doesn’t protect the integrity of their listings than the overall value to everybody who uses their service suffers. I’m sure Google’s competitors would love to see them drop the ball like this.
3) As a webmaster I try to live by Google’s guidelines and expect others to do the same. My entire strategy for search engines can be summed up in three words: just be relevant. Do a search on that phrase with my name in Google and you’ll find an article I wrote on that very subject a couple years ago.

Of course it’s pure fantasy to believe that everybody else on the web will try to respect other websites that they are benefitting from, but the only person’s actions and ethics of which I do have absolute, total control over are the guy who stares back at me in the mirror every day.

Pete, I don’t know you personally, but I’m sure by your brief comments that you didn’t mean to infer in any way that you don’t care about the guidelines or rules of a website that you are benefitting from — and benefit from Google you most certainly are. I don’t even have to look at your server stats to guess that a large percentage of SE traffic you’re currently receiving is coming from Google. So let’s be real here: it’s different to talk about Google guidelines and rules that you are benefitting from than to talk about another person’s blog or website that you are not benefitting from. If you tell me I have to pay you $100 every time I mention your name then just think how many people would be out there hoping, waiting and praying that I talked about them so I could pay them $100 per violation. Silly and absurd.

We have only a couple simple guidelines and they are italicized and right above the submit button so they cannot be missed. Some may not like the fact that we ask them to be “coherent” and that we reserve the right to remove anything or everything they say if we feel that they aren’t being coherent (again, that is subjective).

Hey, more power to being incoherent!

This is a free country and I believe in free speech and anybody can start their own weblog and be as incoherent as they want to be on their own webspace (and they can even trackback their incoherent rants over to blog entries published here, we just might not keep the trackback alive). I just don’t have to pay to read incoherent speak unless I feel like it Ahh, a free country.

Bottom line: each of us is solely responsible for our individual actions and ethics. We can’t do too much about the actions and ethics of others except make mental notes in business and personal about what type of people to do business with online and off.

Hey, I just noticed that Pete has Yahoo 360 invites! I wonder if he’ll send me one? Yeah, I’m still not going to review it, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious about what it’s really like. It’s TDavid at gmail dot com, Pete (or anybody else that’s one of The Chosen Few) if you aren’t mad at me or anything. Film at 11!

Update 3/31/05: Thank you to Steve Dembo who sent me a Yahoo 360 invite last night. Pete also stopped by and sent me an invite (thank you, I already got one, so I’ll not answer that and you can use for somebody else). Hopefully later today I’ll get some more time to check out Yahoo 360 and see what it’s all about. I did notice one thing … when you get a message from another member it emails you to tell you there is a message — but it doesn’t actually send the message, so you need to login and view the message. What good is that?

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