Dan Richardson of New West (the voice of the Rocky Mountains ["Hello, Rocky Mountains." "I'm sorry, Jim, all my affairs are being handled by New West."]) in his short article "High-Powered Press Coverage Of Our Faceless, Robotic Overlords" quoted me. Although he did quote me as a faceless (robotic?) blogger, as opposed to me being Jim Benson.
But apart from me not getting my ego-juice by seeing my name in New West's pixels, Dan's article has an absolutely bone chilling paragraph:
The company — whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil” — has refused to discuss what, exactly, it’s up to in our fair town. When New West Columbia Gorge interviewed a company spokesman earlier this year, all we received were pleasantries entirely void of substance. The company declined to discuss its operations with the Times, too, and that paper’s reporters noted that “many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year.” (my emphasis)
Okay, I have been an urban planner for a long time. A lot longer than I've been in high tech. I even did a transportation plan for The Dalles about a decade ago.
It is not appropriate for any city attorney or city manager to say that they cannot discuss official public business because they have signed a confidentiality agreement. There are a million ways to discuss what Google is doing while not divulging corporate secrets - unless Google is doing something like the world's largest Meth Lab or child pornography.
Therefore, I can only assume it is a meth lab or child pornography.
No one is asking what, precisely, Google is doing there. But they are asking, in general, you know, why the hell they are taking over The Dalles.
So, what is probably going on is that Google wants to hype something in the future and just like those billboards that say "It's coming!" "It's almost here!" and then later you find out that it is something you really couldn't care about - Google is playing the media to build mystique.
Mytique is great - but The Dalles is a nice community in Oregon with people who, in general, are pretty nice as well. And when you drop a couple of sprawl boxes along the pictureque Columbia River and invite a couple hundred people to add to local traffic - that's not nice.
I understand that Google is not a company that thinks about urban design. Outside downtown Palo Alto or downtown San Jose, there is no urban design in Silicon Valley. So I don't necessarily fault them for their blindness. Suburban blandness is all they know. But Oregon doesn't work that way.
Years ago, Intel built a plant out in the middle of Nowhere by Portland. The response from the locals was to put light rail near it and force it to join the community. Luckily, Intel welcomed the integration into the region and has been a fairly good neighbor. They did not make government officials swear not to talk about them.
Google, you got some 'splainin' to do.
"Therefore, I can only assume it is a meth lab or child pornography." - dude, please. It's obviously nukes or bioweapons.
Posted by: kjtii | 19 June 2006 at 12:26