"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." -Mary Wollstonecraft

A couple of weeks ago, there was a thread called "google & privacy" on the lib-techie mailing list Progressive Exchange, commenced with an innocent question about the search behemoth's ubiquitous IP tracking, and losing itself on the fringes of a trackless mire over the relative corporate responsibility of making profitable terms with the Chinese government.

Google makes slick tools, and I've certainly left my own fingerprints all over their logs. But it's pretty surprising the degree to which many progressives are willing to let Google skate with no more accountability than its Wal-Mart-smiley slogan, "Don't Be Evil" -- or even, in criticism, to underscore some perceived failure of non-evilness as a matter for corporate ethos and little more.

Like most of the blogoverse, I've consented to the unsatisfying and barely compensated practice of selling myself to Google Adsense on my hobby blog, which I should add is pointedly non-partisan.

I hardly monitor religiously the stuff Google pitches my paltry readership, but you get the occasional one that makes you scratch your head and flip back to the entry to figure out how it made the match.

Other times, there's less mystery than an episode of Columbo. Like when you post about an execution in Iran, and you get ...

The Mountain View borg strikes again.

Google today went public with embeddable maps, YouTube style. Here's DIA's neighborhood:

View Larger Map

So just like YouTube, you don't have to face the choice of rocking the API or sending people away from your site to give geographic data.

Considering the plentitude of mashup awesomeness already on-hand for Google maps, and the obvious utility for some nonprofits of using geographic representations, it'll be a lot of fun to see how this gets used.

Google has a President's Day weekend warm fuzz for anyone publishing their blog's RSS feed with FeedBurner: Google Reader and start pages have just begun reporting successfully to the service. Anyone with a blog that uses FeedBurner, as this one does, should be sure to hit their dashboard this week.

Via ProBlogger, where comments suggest a bump of +50% or so -- right around the neighborhood DIA's spiked up -- is fairly typical.