What started out as a single blog post last week apparently spiraled into a fairly heated blog-driven conversation between some of the big names in the blogosphere:  Blake Ross wrote a post about Google's tips… Matt Cutts responded… Danny Sullivan soothed things over… and Michael Arrington stirred things up again.  Needless to say, there's quite a bit of buzz going on about this whole exchange.  It's not often that you have the co-founder of Firefox, the most prominent Google blogger, a veteran industry writer, and one of the top 5 bloggers in the world all together in one, big cyber-debate.

I've taken my fair share of stabs at Google, particularly recently.  In fact, I sided with Ross last week and said Google was "fouling" it's advertisers with the introduction of the those "tips".  While my opinion of the issue hasn't changed, I do have to give Google credit where it's due.  One of the reasons I like Google is because they are responsive to feedback.  It's hard to find responsive companies of any size today, let alone one as big and influential as Google.

Matt Cutts has posted what I'm sure he hopes is the final installment in the "tips" debacle:  "The real lesson from this week ".  In his post on the issue, Techcrunch's Arrington challenged Cutts to be more critical of Google because "that is exactly what Google needs right now".  Cutts' response is not only to disagree, but to offer some pretty compelling reasons why he does not more openly criticize his employer.  But the response is less about himself personally and more about Google as a whole.

While he says it's already happening slowly, Cutts wants Google to start more actively monitoring the blogosphere to see what people think of it's products and services.  Not only would this be great feedback for the company, but it would also give Google a more active voice in responding to questions and concerns from bloggers.  As Cutts says, he shouldn't be the only one speaking for the company.

As I said before, this post illustrates one of the reasons I like Google.  They seem to be concerned with the user experience in a way that so many companies aren't.  And I'm not just talking about the user experience testing I've mentioned before.  They seem to care about what people are doing with their products and how they could be better.  They seem to be open to feedback.  And if Cutts is right, and this is the trend the company is taking, they seem like they'll be more proactive about customer feedback in the future.

I guess we'll have to see if Cutts can get the ball rolling faster.