Some of you may have heard about Google’s latest Brain Fart … Sidewiki. It’s an add-on to your browser that sits right on the left hand side of your website, taking up a large amount of room (room that would have been your website), and allows any Tom, Dick and Harry to literally say whatever they want to about your site, without you having the ability to moderate these comments. Google says you can report abusive comments, but it’s entirely at their discretion as to whether or not it is abusive. Essentially, Sidewiki is a parasite on the Web that free rides on the hard work and the investments website owners.

To top it off, they have not even given website owners the option of opting out of having Sidewiki comments alongside of their site.

There are many reasons why I find this objectionable … more than objectionable … it’s downright evil.

1. First off … it creates a huge distraction. Here you are, working your butt off and maybe even spending cash to get traffic to your sites, and now you have this enormous conversation hosted on Google going on about you and your site completely out of your control.
2. Google is stealing your comments. Many site owners work very hard to develop a relationship with their readers and get a lot of comments on their blogs. This dialogue with their readers is an important part of their blogs and makes your blog more valuable. Well, Google is stealing that. Now they can just use Sidewiki to comment, but it isn’t moderated in any way and it isn’t really threaded so you can’t respond to a particular comment.
3. Google is providing the means for spammers and for competitors to sabotage your blog. Competitors can drop by and pretty say anything they want to discredit you or attempt to ruin your reputation. Spammers can drop by and offer their bill of goods … cialis anyone? How about some viagra? Maybe a little peep show? Blackhatters and other garden variety spammers are already testing it’s usefulness for getting traffic from your site to theirs using Sidewiki and it’s only a matter of time before the programmers have bots that can do this to thousands of sites at a time. This is very evil.
4. How long do you think it will be before Evil Google runs ads on Sidewiki that competes directly with your own ads, thereby stealing your ad revenue that you’ve worked so hard to get?

So how do you fight Google? Are they likely to listen to the feedback of webmasters? If past history is any indication, I doubt that there is a Google solution on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean that you have to just take whatever Google decides to dish out.

If you want to block Sidewiki on your blogs and your static sites, here is a script that does just that. The Evil Sidewiki sidebar is still shown by the website and a user can leave a comment, but as soon as the page is refreshed, the comments do not show. Poof … gone!

If you’re as outraged at Google hijacking the Internet and your websites, send Google feedback here.

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