Adam Bosworth updated his weblog for the first time in almost three months. Adam publishes one of my favorite weblogs, but stopped posting because people saw his words as the words of Google and attacked the company. Adam is Google’s VP of Engineering.
I haven’t posted for quite a while because my last posts caused unfair attacks on Google by twisting the words I’d used in my posts and attributing my posts to Google. I want to be really clear about something. The opinions I express in this Blog are my own. They have nothing to do with Google’s opinions. Google only asks that I not leak information about future products. Period. But despite that, recent blog posts of mine were used to attack Google and this upset me deeply. Much to my surprise, Dare Obasanjo came up to me and told me, after some fairly vitriolic complaining from me to him about this earlier state of affairs, that he wished I’d continue to post. I thought about this over the weekend and decided that to some degree, you have to take your chances in this environment rather than just hide when you don’t like the behavior and that perhaps I was being over sensitive anyway. There are too many interesting things going on right now anyway.
Adam is where he is at today because he has a huge amount of domain knowledge about the issues that are important to the infrastructure of the web. He is also a Google executive.
Can Adam’s weblog have its own voice or is he always speaking for Google? There are many industry issues out there that need to be intelligently discussed and there has been a lot of negative energy creating a culture of risk-averse weblogs (see cheese sandwich).
I am very glad to see Adam’s voice rejoining the conversation.