On Sunday, the blog Slashdot posted a bit of news regarding Amplify Education, Inc., the education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Murdoch has said that he sees a multibillion dollar opportunity in the education sector, and has followed up on the goal of capitalizing on that market share by buying Wireless Generation and launching Amplify. News Corp. announced Amplify's creation in July 2012 with the hopes of creating a new digital learning platform in partnership with AT&T. The subsidiary boasts Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City's public schools, as its CEO. The company recently announced the creation of its first product: a tablet that will be sold exclusively to school districts that contains a suite of educational software. Teachers will be able to periodically take students' immediately digital pulse on whether their lesson was effective.
On Slashdot, user "theodp" ran a Google cache search of the site. The results, as theodp put it? "Obscene."
Despite Amplify's policy against pornographic and vulgar content, a site search of the term "donkey" within Amplify's pages yields some offending text. Which has to do with donkeys and more than one body part. As Slashdot put it, "So, does someone at Amplify really want to "@&^$" your "a**"?"
Amplify says no.
"Hi, I'm the editor of Amplify.com," Stephanie Chang, the editor of Amplify, wrote in a comment responding to the original Slashdot post. "We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site." (As the original Slashdot post notes, Amplify bought its domain name secondhand and a previous version of Amplify.com functioned as a social networking site that let users share different things they found online).
Chang added that Amplify "did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it." The company is working with Google to update its caches. "In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience."
Awkward.