In an interesting piece about blogging in Business Week, I come across this oddity:

A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it’s something you wouldn’t e-mail to a long list of strangers, don’t blog it.

That might be common something, but it doesn’t look like common sense to me. If I used that criterion, I can’t think of anything that I’d ever blog, since I would never email anything to a long list of strangers. On my planet, that’s called spamming.

If Google officials don’t understand the difference between a hyperlink that someone comes across, and decides to go investigate it, and having that same person’s mailbox filled with someone’s uninvited ravings, they’re frighteningly clueless about the internet. I wonder if this quote was taken out of context?