defends

Google Docs has been the subject of some not-great press over the past week or so; a ClickStream study, in particular, suggested that the productivity offering has been ignored by a lot of people.  But Matt Cutts has stepped forward with some new statistics, and it seems that the market share of Google Docs may not be quite so slim, after all.

Laura Macias, mayor of Mountain View, California, where Google is based, disagrees that Google isn't a "model citizen," as portrayed in an article published by the Los Angeles Times. In fact, things sound downright peachy.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke with Federated Media's John Battelle to discuss Google's purchase of DoubleClick, Network Neutrality, and the company's seemingly aggressive movement into Microsoft territory with the release of a new PowerPoint-like web application.

When Google put out its year-end Zeitgeist, an account of the hottest searches in 2006, bloggers immediately felt the list's creators were fudging it a little for decency's sake. Google responded on its blog saying the list was edited to save us from the boredom of constants and givens.

While taking a break from the activities at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Google co-founder Sergey Brin talked about Google.cn and the growing kerfuffle over Google's acquiescence to China's censorship demands.

Google is currently embroiled in a bitter battle with publishers over their Google Print entity. A lawsuit filed last week by the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) challenged Google over their Print plans. During a speech in Tokyo, Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the lawsuit a "routine part of doing business."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a brief in federal court in favor of former opponent DirecTV after the operator of a website designed to aid those who had been sued by the telecom company filed suit against DirecTV for viewing his website after he explicitly told them not to.

The company is under an obligation to obey the law wherever it operates, and had to comply with Chinese authorities.