The Odd Case of the Disappearing "Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review"

Below an email, slightly edited, sent to a valued PDPBR subscriber:

Dear --- ,

Thank you for your interest in the rather odd case of the disappearing Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review (PDPBR) blog on Google Blog Search, where until recently it was prominently featured when "public diplomacy" was used as a search term. Much appreciate your attention -- and I hope your queries re this matter provide you with un po' di divertimento about the Wonderful (but often so Self-glorifying and Absurd) Social Media World.

To bring you up to date, if I may:

(1) Some days ago I sent a Facebook message to former St. Dept. social media guru Jared Cohen (now working for Google in a high profile capacity) re the "disappearance" of the PDPBR. I recently received what seemed to be a response from him via Facebook, but it contained no text.

Jared Cohen

http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/quarterly/open/tech-for-change.html

Tech for Change | Think Quarterly by Google 

www.thinkwithgoogle.com

Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, explains how the ‘think/do tank’ is using open technology solutions to help people tackle some of the world’s toughest problems.

Like · Share · 4 hours ago ·  

[Note: Mr. Cohen's "interconnectivity" paradise apparently allows no room for "comments."]

(2) Hoping to get the PDPBR back on Google Blog Search, what I did, as an experiment, was to make it accessible via my Notes and Essays, my second blog, by citing PDPBR link on entries on this second blog. Lo and behold, the PDPBR did, thanks to this procedure, again appear on Google search -- but not, of course, as the PDPBR per se, but as a subject included in the Notes and Essays.

(3) Which leads me to conclude that perhaps someone/somewhere (the Wizard of Oz?)

has "nixed" the PDPBR, without realizing/taking into consideration that it can be sent via the Notes and Essays (although whatever small impact it had as a "free-standing" site is thereby lessened).

(4) I'm still inclined to consider the option that this minor matter of the "eradication" of the PDPBR on Google Blog Search could be a technical glitch, although the whole episode stirs my curiosity (and slight paranoia after decades of US foreign service in communist/post-communist societies) -- as well as increases my humanistic skepticism re the Internet as an "open communications space." The argument against such a "conspiratorial" view is, of course, that it seems incredible that anyone would bother "liquidating" a non-political blog whose audience is, in terms of numbers, a limited one, if I read Google Analytics correctly.

(5) I've never been able to reach Google by phone. Maybe the Google-ites consider it passe technology or (which is far more likely) they don't want to be bothered by the public (oddly enough, in an age when the social media are supposedly creating a communications paradise where everybody is in touch, incessantly and openly, with everybody else).

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