Greetings. As the "Google conspiracy freaks" seem to be gathering with increasing frequency, I find it necessary to once again note a new situation where it appears that good deeds by Google don't go unpunished.

In today's saga, anti-Obama bloggers are essentially accusing Google of censorship, by virtue of supposedly permitting Obama supporters to manipulate Google's blogging platform and block anti-Obama blogs.

That the Google system apparently misclassified the blogs in question is seemingly not a matter of dispute, but the evidence suggests that the problem was caused by an unintended consequence of Google's aggressively effective anti-spam mechanisms, which like all other complex mechanisms created by mere humans, can be subject to error.

In fact, if Google didn't aggressively filter for spam-related materials in that environment, the entire related infrastructure could quickly fall into useless chaos and people would be screaming at Google about that, we can be sure.

As anyone who has worked with spam filters knows, there is a complicated balance involved in spam detection, and it's inevitable that sometimes mischaracterization of traffic will occur. In very large and by necessity highly automated environments, this can potentially result in problems such as those reported in this situation.

Just like any other responsible party faced with such a situation, Google will analyze the circumstances that triggered this event and I have no doubt make appropriate changes to help avoid a repetition.

So let's try to keep these sorts of events in perspective. Nobody was killed, no planets were detonated, the space-time continuum is (according to my instrumentation) still humming along in its usual somewhat inscrutable fashion.

Complex systems (and even many simple systems for that matter) are almost never perfect. Making a Matterhorn out of a pimple, as in this case, doesn't advance the ball in a useful and positive way for anyone.

--Lauren--