The online versions of Newsweek and the Washington Post now show related Technorati results in a sidebar. This should help Technorati stand up against the advent of Google’s blog search.

And Technorati may need that help. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers gaming Technorati’s system. They add whatever tags appear in the top ten of Technorati’s listings in order to increase their traffic, even if their post has nothing to do with that topic. For example, if you search for “Burger King Commercial,” the phrase listed at this moment as the top search on Technorati, about half the results are at best tangential to the commercial itself. Google’s done a good job of weeding out such search engine abuse from normal web pages, and indeed, when I search for “Burger King Commercial” in its blog search engine I seem to get more relevant results. If that’s a trend, Google might draw off quite a few Technorati users.

No doubt about it: the story of the Este family, trapped in their attic while New Orleans flooded, is moving. But something seems slightly inappropriate about how CNN has photoshopped the images of these evacuees into a slick, Reader’s Digest-like promotional banner, while they’re still homeless and their dead grandmother lies unburied.

The first seems obvious but is not always acknowledged: not every culture’s views are equally legitimate. By criticizing Yahoo’s actions the French group Reporters Without Borders supposes–correctly–that there are ethical standards that transcend cultural and political borders. Yet many among today’s intelligentsia might consider such a view chauvinistic, were it delineated explicitly.

The second observation is that we can expect this kind of ethical quandary with international corporations such as Yahoo. While we should apply ethical standards that transcend borders, those standards have to come out of a cultural framework of some sort. Many international corporations have no common cultural framework from which to draw a set of ethical standards (because the culture of each country’s office is different), and their leadership is so diluted (i.e. not like a family business), that they end up being non-ethical. What regulates their behavior then becomes only what best promotes the company while obeying local laws. Oftentimes those interests happen to align in ways good and helpful both to the bottom line and society. Sometimes they don’t, as in Yahoo’s dealings with Shi. Then we become concerned.