In a sad move reeking of corporate censorship and ‘need to know’, Google edited a recent blog entry.

I’ll quote Mark Pilgrim on this because he summarizes the issue nicely:

Briefly seen on Google Blog:

Interestingly, when we announced our engineering center in Bangalore, we found ourselves knee-deep in the debate about “outsourcing” — the practice of cutting a company’s American operations in favor of cheaper labor elsewhere. India in particular has been a subject of a lot of press coverage on this topic lately, which we find to be pretty unfair. It’s not their fault they have a lot of brilliant computer scientists who don’t care to relocate to the States.

The paragraph has since been deleted without explanation.

This kind of revisionist history is unacceptable, regardless of who does it. If you don’t want it saved for all time, don’t publish it on the Internet. Putting blog on the top of the page does not absolve you of all responsibility.

If Google is unable to hold themselves accountable, others will surely do it for them.

Via Slashdot, MetaFilter, and Hello TypePad.

[ link from dive into mark ]

The issue isn’t that Google retracted, but that there was no explanation, retraction notice, etc. At worst it creates a perception that what they said isn’t acceptable (for some reason, it’s a good comment) to the company. At even worst it shows a company who doesn’t understand that blogging at that level is like journalism: you have a responsibility.