"Now, as a statement of fact, "search on Google" is a cop-out here. Most of the time people don't even click on links right in front of them, much less do a search."

Yes, but I can understand their POV, independent of the larger censorship issue. Back when I did phone support for a local ISP, I once fielded a call from an angry caller who demanded (!) that "we" stop showing ads on web sites. "We pay enough for our service that we shouldn't be subjected to advertising," the caller reasoned.

Fair enough, I supposed, but was the caller seeing these ads at [isp].com?

"No, CNN. Stop putting ads all over the internet!"

I "made a note of it" and thanked the caller.

So yeah, some people will blame the linker for the content of the link, regardless. As for the larger censorship issue, sounds indeed like a cop-out. I'm betting there was a way to issue a "clean" link if they really wanted to make the effort.

Thanks for your comments about this, Seth. For some reason a lot of people seem to have no trouble assigning an ultior and unscrupulous motive to my simply wanting to be treated with the same respect as Boing or SearchEngineLand, yet people easily look past the fact that everyone at PBS got a paycheck in exchange for the time they spent on the Google/sexblog story.

The ultimate irony (for me at least) is that while my and other's initial fears that this might have been some sort of erotophobic purge at Google were unfounded, only to have PBS do exactly what we had worried Google might have been doing.

In light of this, can you blame people like for being suspicous?

Thanks again,
TC