Google aren’t being nice any more.  And I know you probably already knew this, but the point is that when news like that reaches me, it means that this story is really getting around.  When us kitten-bloggers learn something, then it is well and truly being learned, by actual people.

It reached me from this, for instance, in among a Long Tail discussion, i.e. in among a discussion about something else:

. . . One disgruntled publisher complains she’s owed less than the minimum Google can be bothered to pay her. And, as fast as she makes money, Google lifts the threshold. [She writes:] “When I started with Adsense in late 2004/ early 2005 the minimum was $25. Just when was about to hit the $25 minimum, they raised it to $50. Now that I have $45 in my account, the minimum is $100. Granted, I have a site with very low traffic, but how many website owners are getting screwed by Google? . . .”

And from this:

Michael Arrington recently wrote that Google will have to still live up to its famous “Don’t be evil” tagline, even though now they have tons of money, with lots of advertisers and shareholders to keep happy.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Google is no longer in the search business, Google is now in the cash cow business. And money, like Cyndi Lauper once sang, changes everything.

Maybe they should change their tagline to “Don’t be THAT evil”. More believable, somehow.

By the way, a “kitten-blogger”, for my purposes here, doesn’t mean only or even at all kittens.  It means whatever combination of things the blogger happens to be interested in, with no regard to the tastes of any readers who happen by or to the mere numbers or grandeur of such readers.  Kitten bloggers basically blog about me me me.  So, in my case, that is my own photos, other people’s photos, other people photo-ing while being photoed by me, England cricket, England 15-a-side rugby (the Six Nations is about to crank itself up again – hurrah!), classical music (mostly classical music CDs), portable computers, occasional eruptions of libertarianism and (or?) anti-Islamism, plus recorded conversations with friends and others, plus whatever else I feel like noticing no matter what and regardless of anything or anybody.

It’s been a while since a kitten as such has actually appeared here.  As to that I promise nothing either way.  Kitten bloggers seldom promise anything.  They don’t have a brand that they feel they have to live up to.  They just blog, much as people have for many decades been chattering away happily on the telephone.  (My only deviation from true kitten-blogging is that I do tend to blog some sort of something-or-other every day, except when I’m taking a pre-announced break.) Individually, a kitten-blogger is nothing.  Collectively, we are a combined conveyor belt for the discoveries of the geeks and the specialist high-traffic big-brand bloggers to regular people.  That’s because, apart from blogging, we sort of are regular people.  We are, come to think of it, rather like the newspapers, which perhaps explains why we so often like to diss newspapers even as we steal their stories.  We get things wrong all the time, but when we notice stuff, that still counts for something.

Of course a blogger who specialises in knowing about things like Google (but who never mentions the England cricket team from one year to the next) would know that the blog-buzz about Google is now turning seriously nasty.  And those persons have all, presumably, been blog-buzzing to that effect for many months and even years now.  But the basic point here is that I don’t blog about Google as a matter of daily duty, merely out of occasional curiosity, and even I now know that Google is now facing a lot of bad vibes.  Be afraid, Google.

It’s all rather like IBM and Microsoft, in other words.  Nothing lasts for ever.  But the good news for Google is that the cash cow business can trundle on for a long time.  Again, look at IBM and Microsoft.  They both manage, still, to scratch a living.