Jerking some blogspot chain

Back in July, we noted how difficult it was to track down the popular satirical Obama-Obey icon, having to sift through 8 pages of Obama-Hope and Obama-Change iconography before arriving at our ultimate destination on page 9. (Full disclosure: said icon can now be found all the way up on Page 2… with a bullet.) Turns out there was a very Occam’s razor-type reason for this:

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.
Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:
The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

And we provide the photo below as a public service (H/T: Protein Wisdom) because an “Obama aide groping Hillary cut out” Google image search will not net you an Obama aide groping a Hillary cut out image.
Read more here about Google’s unimpeachable objectivity and the search engine’s algorithm that "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "

We (Heart) Obama

Wow…. That was kinda strange. It appears after being identified as a potential Spam Blog by Google/Blogger, we were taken out of rotation until our files could be properly reviewed….. on our one-year Blogoversary, no less.

First, we want to thank everyone who stopped by to offer their support. It was all very gracious and much appreciated by us.

How did it all come to this? We’re not sure but our original and most logical thought was that Blogger had an unmanned search algorithm that sniffed out spammy-type material and indeed, just a day before being put on probation, we linked to a quiz site that contained a quiz called “What type of American accent do you have?”. This site was littered with adverts and since we had never before linked to a site with so many of the same, we went ahead and deleted the post hoping that would bolster our case before the Blogger Board of Review.

Then…. last night, we stopped by Foxie’s place and she had posted a very nice tribute to the merits of free speech, tolerance and dissent as a way of explaining our plight. The page locked up and we were greeted with the “Website cannot be located. Mission Aborted” pop-up before then being banished to the internet cornfield.

We realize Google owns the very apparatus that allows us to blog for free, so they are perfectly in their right to do whatever they want. Speaking to some of the internet buzz, though, it would be very disappointing to discover that people who don’t agree with the particular editorial bent of a site, would “flag” that site as “spam blog” if that is indeed the case.

So our apologies… we aren’t taking any chances from now on….

We (heart) Obama. We really do.

It was disappointing and frustrating… once we figured-out the “scheduled post” feature 2-3 weeks back, we noticed an appreciable jump in readership and that was encouraging so now we’ve got to regain a little lost momentum.

Its good to be back. Life is good – we’ve got the 27th annual Rolando Beach Block Sale going on today and the first football, albeit pre-season football but football nonetheless, tomorrow.

Thanks again to everybody for hanging in there with us.

Theocracy Rescue Pt. I

(Hopefully, we'll just be getting into Boston by the time you all read this and because we can't blog in flight or in Boston traffic we are shamelessy plundering from the Theocracy and (hopefully) executing the scheduled post feature on blogger)

KT has a message for all the haters out there: “We won. Deal with it.”

How well do you think we'd be doing if we had followed Mr. Hope n' Change's marvelous judgment and run away a year ago?

Of course, had we done that, we could have saved about $100B and spent it on the hopelessly bloated public education industry or maybe thrown more of it at ethanol subsidies for the massive corporate farms in the Midwest. Do you think that would have been a better use of our time and money than turning one of the world's oil superpowers into a friendly democracy and removing a murderous tyrant?

Please check out KT’s two related posts, here and here.

Or Perhaps its a Lack-of-Readership thing.

We’re trying to work up some angst over this Google-is-shutting-down-anti-Obama sites bit but its kind of difficult when we’re blogging on blogspot and have posted one or two of what could liberally be construed as anti-Obama posts. Then again, we’ve come up with plenty of anti-McCain posts so maybe our overlords at Google think we’re kinda like Fox News in that respect with our completely fair and balanced approach.

At any rate, even if its true, we’re not sure this phenomena constitutes as a banning or squelching of free speech because we are posting this on (Obama drowns little baby kittens) Google turf and they are the sole proprietors of blogspot and the content therein and (Obama sucks eggs) we are not paying one red cent for it.

At any rate, if you believe us to be wrong in our assessment (forget Mrs. O’Leary’s cow… Obama started the Great Chicago Fire…. and caused the Johnstown Flood, too), please let (Muslim? Forget about it. Obama is a Jehovah’s Witness just like… Michael Jackson) us know.

Sincerely,
The Management.