Wow.. This is serious stuff.. Read the entire story... http://talkbiz.com/blog/google-steals-the-web/
Lol.. Interesting post.. and personally i found it very interesting also..many new things are there to read.
It is much more then just that. If you read the article the side wiki can completely destroy your websites rep and there is nothing ( atleast right now) you can do about it. I think Google has gone to far on this one..
No, not that serious. a waste of time. couldn't finish the article. He could of said the same thing in one paragraph.
I would say this is fairly serious "If they see something there that offends them, they’re not going to blame Google’s moderation team. They’re going to blame you. They’re not going to believe that you can’t delete it if you wanted to, since “it’s on your site.â€" "Given that a big chunk of the web population that sees them will assume those comments are part of your site, (and even if they didn’t), this is significant. An external entity has created a system designed to effectively allow people to place uninvited broadcast messages on your system, with the potential to seriously damage your business or personal life." "At least email spammers pretend to give you a choice to stop getting their garbage. Some actually stop if you ask them. Google makes no pretense of offering an opt-out. There’s nothing in their system at this point that lets you say, “Keep your hands off my content.â€" These are just small examples, There are many more.
I see 2 issues here, and its Google's destruction of the internet all over again. 1. most people with a bad experience complain, but people with good experince dont say anything at all, so lots of bad comments for everyone as there is always something wrong, site speed one day because of a server upgrade, whatever.... 2. How to combat the issue, make lots of comment of your own, a new part of SEM, spamming the system with good comments from fake Google accounts. So this is just like when google said you need content to rank well, so people that didnt need content on their site because their flash web design site looked nice and did the job it was intended suddenly spammed their own sites with useless customer facing content, making the site look terrible. Well done Google, let me congratulate you on your next step to devalue the web!
I have made a complaint to Google regarding this. I am completely against it and hope that with enough of our voices, Google will be forced to remove this injustice to all of webmasters. I personally do not need my web space, and website taken over by Google. It would be fine if you could opt out of having these comments on your site, but Google has not even showed that as an option. Spammers will have a field day with this one, and if you have a competitor that is vicious you bet you will probably get attacked on your own site. This will lead to companies being ruined just because they can be. I look forward to the law suites that will follow, Google has it coming, specially if they are not listening to us all complain. If you want to tell Google how you really feel about sidewiki, do it here http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/bin/request.py?contact_type=feedback, maybe if enough of us say no to sidewiki, they will put a stop to it.
Darn, Google thinks they are King of the Net and are proving it with each and every passing day. They so LITTLE Care for us webmasters that non of us can actually imagine it. This webmaster protest will lead to Nothing if other big guys don't step in and tell Google to stop it, but I guess everyone of the other big companies are simply looking on how to do next thing that could bring them closer to being #1 instead of Google. I guess that unless we SUE Google enmass Nothing will stop this shitty sidewiki garbage...
lol instead of leaving negative rep, people can now just go to your website and vandalize it in sidewiki comments. Here are a few resources on how to defeat sidewiki with javascript and redirects http://code.google.com/p/sidewiki-defeat/ -OR- .htaccess RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GTB [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} GoogleToolbar [NC] RewriteRule !^nogtb\.php$ /nogtb.php [L] .PHP <?php if(preg_match("/GTB6/i",$SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"])) { // DO SOMETHING HERE } ?>
Good to see people already thinking about solutions. This new google trash must be eradicated. I'm already thinking at some user side countermeasures for this crap. Basically google want to steal 25% of our websites space along with tagging trash comments. Everyone know google is awful at communicating with people at personal level (think all your tickets/appeals/etc that are never even read) so i know already what kind of moderation this comments on trashwiki will have.
This is really a cancer on the internet. There was a similar project to this made many years ago and it received so much bashing and so many lawsuits that it disappeared. I can't believe Google brought it back, though. The only good part is that I can't imagine casual internet users going through the trouble of installing this thing, or even knowing it exists...it will probably be one of those tools that only the internet marketing crowd will bother with...or fight against..