Blasi Blah

So here is what is going on:

There was a horrible accident during practice at the winter Olympics in Vancouver where 21-year old Georgian luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili died while practicing on the world’s longest luge drop.

After this Google in typical fashion had a logo graphic featuring the Olympics, in this instance the Luge events were pictured. (shown below)

Shortly after making it way online the public decided this was in bad taste due to the events of the previous day.  There were Twitter posts, Facebook comments, blog posts all bashing Google for poor taste and judgment.  At the same time there were two other views I saw which appeared in slightly lower numbers, those views being that it was a good tribute and that it really made no difference at all.

Here is the current graphic as of this post:

Personally I tend to fit into the later, I simply do not see the huge issue of the graphic.  Before I get a ton of hate mail, I agree the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili is a horrible tragedy and not something to joke about in any way.

I think hitting Google for the graphic on their site is really just a cry for attention by those who are feeling lonely behind their screens, the fact is that Google on a regular basis creates custom homepage graphics to publicize events happening around the world.  A few additional examples of this include the Sesame Street anniversary week graphics, New Years, Christmas, Thanksgiving and the list goes on.

Now I read by Samuel Axon on Mashable that “Individual sensibilities differ regarding this, but Google apparently decided to play it safe by replacing the logo.” which was in response to the article “Google yanks luge-themed search page after torrent of slams from Web’s poor taste police” by Larry Mcshane of NYDailyNews.com.

In all of these articles no one ever mentions or even considers that Google may have planned on pulling the logo at that time.  Considering that they created an entirely new logo I would seem to thing that it was planned or they called in a designer last min as an emergency.  While either is possible there are no facts to claim either side, so reporters in typical fashion take the emotional site and play it up until they cannot find anything else to say.  Just another example of professional reporters for major news networks reporting what they feel without having ALL the facts to justify it.

While I am not surprised to see this on NYDailyNews.com as I have been noticing it more and more over the last 18 months, but I am surprised Mashable staff writers had no  thought to consider Google’s regularly changing logo and homepage graphics during memorable and historic events.