It was interesting to read The Guardian’s interview with Sergei Brin today in which he expresses concern about commercial interests and governments damaging some of the principles that have made the web so successful, and Google so successful at searching it.

I was lucky enough to meet Sergei years ago at the first Super Nova conference in Palo Alto just before their IPO. We were each allowed to ask him one question. My question was what he was going to do, being an American company with, at the time, most of its servers on American soil, when the US Government asked them to index some bits of the web better than others or in some other way tried to control their activities.

He didn’t really have an answer but from his comments in The Guardian interview it would seem he has been trying harder to come up with some recently.

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Three things triggered this post.

First a blog post from Doc about the very sad story of a young lad killed during a fraternity hazing event. The institutionally acceptable nastiness struck me.

Second a couple of examples of trolling in Google Plus that have caused distress and show willingness, even from those who should know better, to indulge their nastiness at others’ expense.

Lastly the riots in London. I’m not inclined to read more into them than bad lads using the excuse to behave badly, but that is the point. The fact that they feel it is OK to give vent to their aggression and appear to have no sense of the effect on others of their actions.

We all have moments when we feel justified in our nastiness and it is all too easy to indulge ourselves. I sometimes feel that my own occasionally robust online reactions to things I observe and comment on risk tipping the wrong side of my personal standards. I try to remember Gandhi’s advice but don’t always succeed: “If you are right you have no reason to be angry. If you are wrong you have no right to be angry”.

We all pay a price when we make being unkind OK in however small a way.

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I knew I started blogging around this time of year in 2001 but thanks to a server crash in December 2001 I had no record of my first blog post. I tried The Wayback Machine but couldn’t remember the original url. I had tried various searches on Google and using Devon Agent but with no success but then I remembered that Ev Williams, who started Blogger and now Twitter, had made me a “Blog of Note” on the front page of Blogger in 2002. A search for that got me my old url and The Wayback Machine then came up with the goods.

So my first ever blog posts are preserved here and I began on the 3rd of March 2001. On day three I said:

“I started feeling a bit uneasy about this blog today. Who will ever read it and what will those who do think?”

Ten years later I am still wondering …..

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Sergey Brin – founder of Google – learned that he could be significantly predisposed to Parkinson’s Disease. When asked whether ignorance might have been better, his response is that knowledge is better than uncertainty since he can now make adjustments to his life to reduce the risk and fund further research. I suspect it is this kind of thinking that puts Google where it is today; it’s all about Knowledge.

Yet, many organisations prefer to either live in ignorance about the risks in their organisations or rely on subjective gut-feel rather than objective measurement to assess it.

Of course the advantage of measuring risk (operational or strategic) is that the act of measurement itself often points towards the very thing that needs to be adjusted to reduce it.

Yet many businesspeople are frightened of measurement. Why? Because it’s benefits are uncertain? Because they are afraid of their inadequacies being exposed? Because they’re afraid of looking foolish because they don’t understand the measurement techniques?

The interesting thing is that both Brin and Gates are inherently measurers, and in both cases, it’s paid when they bother to do it.

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Stowe Boyd writes this morning of the issues of geolocation tools and privacy. I have been an early adopter of Brightkite, Foursquare, Twitter geotagging, Fire eagle and Google Latitude. The only ones I use now are Foursquare and Twitter and even then not all of the time. Like Stowe I often zoom out to city level rather than being specific about my location. I don’t automatically post locations to Twitter to try avoid annoying people with too much noise and only do so when I think there might be a chance of meeting up with someone.

My experience so far has been 100% positive with many serendipitous meetings that I wouldn’t have had without letting people know where I am.

I am always surprised when people write as if they were victims of technology rather than in control of it – I guess it is a bit like email!

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David Miliband talks about his speech at the Google ‘Zeitgeist’ Conference on 21 May 2007

Philip de Lisle :

I wrote an article for the American Chronicle (”Where Did Customer Service Go?“) back in June 2008 which is even more topical today in these harsh economic times.

I was thrilled, and not a little surprised, to discover that it was #1 on Google!

But then disaster struck! The American Chronical “back end” truncated my article to less than one sentence so my Google ranking dropped to #4 – which is astonishing in itself and just goes to show how powerful the correct web page title can be. The problem with the back end was quickly corrected but sadly Google hasn’t been back to reindex my article since the 1st week in January.

So any suggestions how I get the Google bot to return?

Dr. Max Blumberg :

Sergey Brin – founder of Google – learned that he could be significantly predisposed to Parkinson’s Disease. When asked whether ignorance might have been better, his response is that knowledge is better than uncertainty since he can now make adjustments to his life to reduce the risk and fund further research. I suspect it is this kind of thinking that puts Google where it is today; it’s all about Knowledge.

Yet, many organisations prefer to either live in ignorance about the risks in their organisations or rely on subjective gut-feel rather than objective measurement to assess it.

Of course the advantage of measuring risk (operational or strategic) is that the act of measurement itself often points towards the very thing that needs to be adjusted to reduce it.

Yet many businesspeople are frightened of measurement. Why? Because it’s benefits are uncertain? Because they are afraid of their inadequacies being exposed? Because they’re afraid of looking foolish because they don’t understand the measurement techniques?

The interesting thing is that both Brin and Gates are inherently measurers, and in both cases, it’s paid when they bother to do it.

Euan Semple :

I have loads of precise contact categories in Daylite (my CRM), twelve in Google Reader, five in Facebook and will continue to have no lists in Twitter.