Google has thankfully reversed course on their plan to eliminate all blogs featuring sexually explicit material. Bacchus does some detailed parsing of the retraction in posts here and here. I’m happy to see that some of my favorite blogs will be sticking around, but the bottom line remains the same. If you’re an adult blog on Google’s blogger, you’re on borrowed time. Move now or resign yourself to living with a digital Sword of Damocles.
It’s tempting to assign malicious intent in these situations, but I suspect it’s just another example of the the dynamics that exist in big tech companies when it comes to sexual material. To make good decisions you need data and debate. You need people to argue both sides of the discussion and play out scenarios based on the data. It’s no doubt easy for engineers to figure the cost of hosting lots of images, to determine the fraction of adult blogs and to point at sites using blogger as free hosting for advertising commercial porn sites. What’s needed on the other side is for people to dig into adult sites and point out their social value. Unfortunately it’s tough for the average tech person to stand up in a conference room and defend porn and explicit sexual material in front of their coworkers. Who wants to be the person telling their boss that the change might save the company millions of dollars, but it’s really important that Servitor’s femdom captions are shared with the world? I can just imagine the scene – “Yes, I know they’re pretty twisted. I’m sorry that castration one made you uncomfortable. And yes, I know Julie mentioned something about contacting HR after the meeting. And OK, so all the photographs are unlicensed. But dammit, it’s our ethical duty to publish them. It’s what our shareholders would want us to do.”
I’m being deliberately facetious, but I think it highlights the dynamics at play. That said, I think if you choose to work on an open blogging platform, you should be able to engage in these kind of arguments (although probably not in that exact form). If you’re not happy supporting forms of expression about subjects you’re not comfortable with, working with bloggers is not for you. Unfortunately the hiring processes for teams within large companies don’t filter all that well for that kind of criteria. 
I had no idea what image I should feature with this post, so here’s something generally femdom-y and hot. It was featured on hmp’s blog, one of those that was in the firing line for closure.
I should add that I’ve absolute zero insider knowledge into Google’s decision making process on blogger. I’m just going by my knowledge of the dynamics of big tech companies. For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+.
Hi Paltego:
Thanks for keeping me up to date on the goings on with Google. I read your blog and Edge of Vanilla to get my information. Everything happened so fast. I have to wonder wtf happened at corporate headquarters. Who thought this was a good idea and why? Why did they change their minds about such a sweeping decision in only three days? Did they really expect bloggers to be OK with having their blogs just disappear?
I felt oddly philosophical about the whole thing but I know many other bloggers were extremely upset and rightfully so. Then…*poof*! Never mind! Very strange.
I actually like certain things about Google as a company and even recommended we switch from hosting our own email to using GMail at work. That worked out pretty well so Google isn’t all bad. Perhaps they are concerned about porn tarnishing their image as they make increasing inroads in the corporate market?
Then again corporate logic is sometimes just an oxymoron. I think you describe that phenomenon quite vividly when you say: “For all I know, they might decide everything by games of pin the tail on the intern. Or by having Sergey Brin throwing lawn darts into an organization chart after doing a dozen shots of Jägermeister. Either of those would at least account for Google+”
Well said. And don’t even get me started on Google+.
I suspect that senior folk at corporate headquarters were not involved here. Not that they’d have been against the decision. It’s just that the blogger product is old and stable. It’s not an exciting new thing, which typically means it’ll have a small team and decisions will be taken by relatively junior folk.
I think what’s important from the corporate level is the culture that’s set. If Google really believed in indexing the worlds information (as they claim to) and had a strong culture around freedom of expression and supporting minority speech, then that’d filter down to these small product teams. This kind of decision would never happen with that kind of vision for the company. But I think they’ve moved away from that and become a lot more conservative in recent years. Possibly that’s about the corporate market, but it’s probably more to do with the personalities at the top. That’s my guess anyway, based on very little actual data 🙂
I have a gmail account (along with several others), but I’d be wary about using them for work. They mine everything for data they can use. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts – if you’re getting something for free you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
-paltego
Your analysis sounds accurate. I also think they are becoming more conservative as a company. We are actually a corporate client so we don’t get their services for free. Of course that doesn’t mean they aren’t still mining our data! 😉