Blogger

I need to take a general business class to try and understand the business models of google and blogger. Google made a clear distinction in their venture capital prospectus to "not be evil." Can they remain evil-free when a significant portion of the company becomes public? As a share-holder, could one try to encourage Google to become more evil?

Case in point? Blogger no longer has advertisements at the top of my blog. I am not a paid subscriber or anything. I don't think I see advertisements when I blog, and now I really don't see how they make their money by supporting my useless (witless) ramblings.

Oh, and they own Hello.com, which lets me publish images, ad-free as well.

To paraphrase Ted Kennedy, (or was that Tip O'Neil), the mere absence of evil means that we need to look for proof of evilness. (Said statement was actually about George H.W. Bush jumping into an SR-71 Blackbird and flying to France to negotiate a deal to release the hostages in Iran. You see, he had 6 hours on one day in mid 1980 unnacounted for in his schedule. I miss the eighties sometimes. Not really.)

Google, are you truly not evil?

--gh