BigDave - 9:32 pm on May 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

it's been surprisingly very quiet unless they are just slow to catch up.

I don't see why you are surprised. If you go through this 450 message thread, and start deleting "non-story" messages, there really isn't anything left for the non-tech sector to cover.

On the privacy issue, they are going to be gun shy after they jumped on the anti-gmail bandwagon. So take out all those concerns.

Take out all the posts by people that are always ranting about anything and everything google.

Drop the posts full of speculation about what Google might do with this or that. Or that Google is trying to route all the internet traffic through their servers.

Toss out all the technical discussion about how to block it. Even the fact that websites are blocking it isn't much of a story. Banks blocked my netscape, mozilla, opera and konqueror browsers for years without any press coverage.

They certainly aren't going to care about speculation on how it will affect server bandwidth. And a net gain or loss on server load has yet to be proven.

I don't see the WSJ publishing a front page article about how GWA is making stats programs less accurate than they already are. It's not exactly a big concern to the general population.

About the only thing with any sort of general public interest is the "filling up the shopping cart with unordered items" angle.

But the problem with making a big stink about that is that it is now in very limited testing and there probably aren't even any reporters in the pool. There aren't many editors that will accept a story from a reporter that has not even tried it out.

I've never liked proxies, because it is very rare for them to be set up right, and GWA is no exception. And even when they are, there are a lot of sites that don't have the right cache settings, or no way for the site administrator to change the settings.

The way I see it, the only way to make a difference is to try and help Google to work through the problems, or to have enough websites that block it that users just aren't interested in using it anymore.

[edited by: BigDave at 9:34 pm (utc) on May 9, 2005]