Archive for February 2006
Apple laps itself
I’m sitting on a decent sized chip stack in a poker tournament and digging through my Engadget backlog. Gee, do they post every product sent to them by the PR muffins? It sure seems like they aren’t exercising much editorial filter these days. Anyway I thought they made an excellent point about the iPod Nano…
Read MoreReprinting the cartoon
In case you’re living under a rock, a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhummad. Images of the Prophet are forbidden in Islam, and Muslims around the world complained and demonstrated. Then, to prove that the Europeans are better at being sanctimonious pricks than even Americans are, several European newspapers ran it again…
Read MoreReality Thins Out An Urban Vision
And here we go… In Fairfax County’s official vision for Tysons Corner, thousands of people live clustered around the Metro stops planned there — riding the train or walking to work, leaving their cars at home and injecting new life into the austere glass and concrete hub. But in the reality of developers’ blueprints, a…
Read MoreGoogle China Part Three: Digging out of your hole
[This isn’t an editorial. I am indeed a free speech activist, as any superficial historian of the First Amendment and the Internet can tell you. But everything I say below is written from the point of view of a public affairs strategist: Google’s in a world of trouble and it needs to repair its reputation. …
Read MoreGoogle China Part Two: Complying with the law
The criticism of Google’s China version is emotion-filled but accurate. I don’t mean to imply that a lot of smart and caring people at Google didn’t think hard about a way out of this quandry, only that they chose to draw the line in the wrong place. If you read enough editorials, the critics’ arguments…
Read MoreGoogle China Part One: Keeping Mail and Blog Services Out Of The Oppressors’ Hands
There’s been so much criticism over Google China, it would be impossible not to examine it as a case study for any number of things. I will address the larger debate over the complicity with censorship, but wanted to touch on a point that has been overlooked by many of Google’s critics: Google’s decision not…
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