We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

So let’s see what is problematic with this entire approach. This is quite another kind of censorship. You want to believe that people are not searching for certain things, that those searching for certain things are necessarily “evil” and not merely curious, and that some people have absurd interests, and that’s not normal.

Let me be honest here. I have a morbid sense of curiosity. I have spent hours on wikipedia reading up gory details about the vaguest of things. Why exactly is my curiosity offensive to anyone? Should I pretend I am this naive person who wishes to know nothing about how immensely screwed-up people can be?

I hate Nazi sympathizers and holocaust deniers, I wouldn’t want to be friendly with them. I wouldn’t want to talk to them. I would wish copious amounts of bad luck on them. I wouldn’t want to work with them. I wouldn’t want to be kind to them. But so long as they don’t engage in hate crimes or hate speech, I cannot criminalize them; unless they actually breech someone’s rights. And I wouldn’t censor their presence. Because that misrepresents. And misrepresentation is far more dangerous than someone hating someone. Because you need to know if a certain dark cloud of hatred is descending on you. If this is symbolic of a resurgence of a particular kind of hatred – then we need to know about it, and not hide behind this curtain of political correctness. Unless you know about it, you cannot nip it in its bud.

The other issue. Google appears to decide what is offensive based on a very Euro-American centric world view. While they apologize for it, I am not sure why Google actually removes inappropriate or inoffensive material. Who decides what is offensive? How is appropriateness determined? Both of them are rather cultural constructs. So whose culture are we supposed to adhere to?

I am offended that it was manually removed from the lists. I am offended that that part of my culture is designated inappropriate. How many other things don’t we see on various lists because it’s already determined that they are offensive? Is there an open list somewhere which tells us what terms are automatically excluded? So we at least know what data we cannot expect to see…

I realize how horrendous the holocaust was. How terrible the persecution of the Jews was. How a certain symbol came to be associated with terror, death, intolerance and violence. However, that symbol also has another meaning, and it’s important for that meaning to be acknowledged as well.

PS – This was a very difficult post to write. I hate Hitler and everything he stood for. I hate the fact that the world was so oblivious to the tragedy of so many people – the Jews, the Roma, the disabled, the homosexual – and literally chose to overlook the holocaust even as it was happening. But I think certain symbols were criminalized unfairly. You cannot let one madman rewrite history. You need to take the symbol back. The fear comes from the “popular” association with the symbol, so change the popular association.

It annoys me immensely that Europe (especially Mainland Europe) is so averse to the Swastika, that in some countries you can be arrested for just drawing the damn symbol. Some madman decides to take the symbol, slide it around and after that the Swastika is forever a symbol of intolerance and genocide. But TechCrunch seems to feel really smug by writing this

It looks like a successful spamming attempt, but given the number of queries Google handles it looks to be pretty sophisticated – at one point it was the number one query. We’ve pinged Google for a comment.

Update: It’s now been removed or has fallen off the hot trends list.

This is the Swastika. It is an elegant, beautiful symbol. It has nothing to do with murder or racial arrogance or anything else. When Shefaly points this out to TechCrunch, this is their response- “chill the hell out. We all understand that, but a swastika appearing on the top of google search queries in the U.S. isn’t normal.”

The tone of TechCrunch bothers me. The only interpretation allowed on an otherwise global medium is the one that US sanctions. The other person who really annoys me? A certain Rajan Zed whose sole aim in life appears to be to boycott The Love Guru. Apparently all us Hindus are really offended by the use of the word Guru as it creates a bawdy image of Hinduism. Well Hinduism is a very bawdy religion. Our Gods and Goddesses get drunk, have kids outside of wedlock and randomly lose control. This sanitized version of Hinduism – sans the Swastika, sans the bawdiness bothers me. Ugh. So this Rajan Zed chap frequently spams a lot of desi inboxes with emails about his greatness and the sheer pain the “Hindu Community” feels.

Hindus world over are deeply concerned about the apparent denigration of their traditions by this movie portrayal of Hindu characters like buffoons and parody of yoga, which is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy. In Hindu tradition, guru is sacred and associated with the divine and leads disciples from darkness to light; and guru-disciple relationship is at the heart of Hindu tradition, Zed clarified.

I don’t need a spokesperson. Never asked for one. TechCrunch is now telling me what is “normal”, and Zed is telling me that I am a “pained Hindu”.

Update – Google apologizes for allowing inappropriate content to appear!

Watch out for the part when the “user” holds up an egg, and asks if there is more from this producer, and a helpful person asks her to subscribe to feed (an rss image on the eggshell).

A single e-mail between the DCP in charge of the Enforcement Branch and the California-based company will now nail such persons.

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

Trouble is, that many proxies don’t solve the problem. You cannot access gmail or orkut on many of these services. There are a few like AvoidLimit that may allow access, but the waiting time is likely to fizzle out your hatered.

There are issues that Orkut has. People get stalked. But frankly, please don’t be foolish enough to go about publishing your phone number on a public profile. You’re not asking for it, but a large number of human beings are bored and perverts. As for people creating fake profiles in other people’s names – the internet has a memory for both the fake profile, and the denial. If you ignore it long enough, people will find something else to do. I understand that cyber crimes can be very serious. But we still don’t have a concrete definition of what constitutes a cyber crime. And who exactly is to tell us what “objectionable content” is? If it’s wrong to hate Shivaji, I demand that anyone hating Kannagi be labeled a criminal too. In fact, I demand that anyone hating anything remotely Tamil be tracked down and sent a year’s supply of bad Tamil movies as punishment.

This is the first step. You may not hate anything that the government wants you to love. But tomorrow, it’ll be for some other reason. Maybe they’ll begin by saying that since sodomy is illegal, any homosexual man posting on Orkut will be tracked down. Then, they’ll tell you they’re at your doorstep because you dared to say that Pasta is better than Dal. (Actually, given our current Italian flavour in the government – that might take an election.).

Update – Google has a response. Maybe they should change their tag line to “Don’t do Evil. Just be Ambiguous.”.

Google has very high standards for user privacy and a clear privacy policy. When dealing with requests from authorities, we are very careful to balance the interests of our users while still being as cooperative in the investigation and prosecution of crimes as possible.
What is important to note is that this new reporting tool does not affect the way we treat users’ data – it only enables a faster, direct communication. Authorities will still be required to follow an appropriate legal process in order to get user-identifying information.

What exactly is “legal process” in this case? A bad case of police indigestion?

Children at a rural school in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are running a photoblog about daily life in their village, Kalleda. The school gives children from poor families a free education.

The photo project of the RDF (Rural Development Foundation) school has helped school children learn English, connect them with the world and provided the world with a window into rural India.

Some of the sets are so delightful. Like this one titled People Carrying Things On Their Heads. And the one that is so insightful in its elegance and simplicity – titled Work.

There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities. In lieu of a common definition, we could say that cynicism is the unpleasant way of performing the truth. … The question is therefore: how much truth can a medium bear? Knowledge is sorrow, and the “knowledge society” propagators have not yet taken this into account.

… Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage, and back to everyday boredom.

Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal but a condition whose existence one must recognize. “We blog,” as Kline and Bernstein say. It’s today’s a priori. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: “Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago.” To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. “There is no other world” could be read as a response to the anti-globalization slogan, “Another world is possible”.

Ze mind.. it boggles..