:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.28.2003 ::

:: BLOGGER GETS GOOGLEY-EYED ::

OK. Here's a draft for my story about the Pyra/Google deal. It will be self-syndicated through several regional monthly computer rags. I just had to push past a headache today and crank something out. So, here it is, in all its splendid imperfection:

Blogger Gets Googley-Eyed
By Matthew W. Beale

As you’ve probably heard, Google acquired Pyra, the parent company of Blogger, in mid-February. The deal gave Pyra’s founders and backers shares of Google, but neither company has been very forthcoming with specifics.

Google responded to a request for a comment by repeating the news posted at the Pyra Web site: "We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies, vaguely adding: “in the coming weeks, we will report additional details."

Meg Hourihan, a co-founder of Pyra who has since left the company, said in an e-mail that she hasn’t “heard/seen too many weird reactions” to the deal, but was “surprised by how many people think it means Google's going to become a portal.”

GOOGLE + BLOGGER = WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?

There were of course jokes about Blogger's name being changed to "Bloggle" or even "Blogger powered by Google."

The big question, however, involves those “synergies” and “opportunities” -- what exactly does Google intend to do with Blogger? It’s been reported -- and hinted at above -- that the two companies signed onto the deal without any real plan with regard to how they would merge and work together. Altruism or business opportunity, everyone seemed to have some idea.

“I think the immediate impetus behind the Google/Pyra deal was a simple need for more resources by Pyra, along with a recognition on Google's part that Blogger, in addition to providing data that is useful to Google's index, provides a service that is valued and important on the net, but wasn't reaching its full potential due to resource constraints in the smaller company,” said blogger Anil Dash.

Pyra, still run by co-founder Ev Williams, along with a core team of developers, was, according to a FAQ posted at the Blogger Web site, “bootstrapping,” or “growing without funding.” “A company of Google’s size could give Blogger the resources we needed to do things better, faster, bigger.”

THE POWER OF THE BLOG COMPELS YOU!

A Blog, for the uninitiated, is short for the term weblog – a sort of personal Web page that’s oft described as an online diary or journal, and occasionally even an e-soapbox, although many blogs defy definition. The blog community – that numbers over 1 million on Blogger alone – is as diverse as you’d imagine, with active participants chronicling everything from their daily culinary obsessions to the news of the day, replete with links.

The links generated by bloggers, according to many observers, are crucial to understanding Google’s interest in the popular blog publishing tool creator. Bloggers create links to stories often minutes after being posted by online news services. Blogs are readable in what’s called RSS (rich site summary), a format that makes them readily available to bots that search engines use to crawl and index the Web.

Blogs can also serve to help measure the hotter news items, if you will, through the ability to examine what stories are being most frequently linked to by bloggers.

According to blogger Matt Webb, “Google could use the database to make their results 20-seconds-timely. That could be the next battle front of the search engines, not just breadth but up-to-the-second.”

Hourihan, in a New York Times report, observed that the deal is “about having the Blogger database, not so much the words but what people are pointing to, and getting their finger on that in real time.”

Blogs also tend to add a layer of commentary to news stories that have been linked to, making them compelling to readers online. But this particular deal could potentially have more of an impact.

“For users of the www, (this deal) says quite loudly that there is value in weblogs,” said Webb. “That is, there's value in ultra low cost, ultra low effort ways of individuals writing on the www, not just reading.”

Blogger didn’t create weblogs, and there are a number of other companies offering users access to the means to participate in what has become something of a mainstream phenomenon, including DiaryLand, LiveJournal.com, Movable Type and Radio Userland. Webb said that more blog services should be soon on the way and, according to a recent Microsoft Watch report, the monster from Redmond is gearing up its own related offering.

GOOGLE: SOME HISTORY

Part of the puzzlement that many observers have felt with regard to the deal involves the obvious: Blogger creates the content and Google indexes it. What will this mean for the larger online community?

Firstly, there is some precedent here. When Google acquired a massive Usenet archive from Deja.com in early 2001 and subsequently took most of it offline, Usenet junkies, researchers and others balked and rumblings of e-insurrections were lingering in the mist.

The company made a recovery later in the year, however, placing the archive back online -- at groups.google.com -- giving users access to some 700 million posts stretching back to an article from May 1981.

Google more recently created a news site – news.gogle.com – that’s been ridiculed by some journalists, while being lauded by other online pundits as a significant development in how news is featured on the Internet. Google News, which harvests items from reportedly more than 4,000 sources, has seemed to make itself immune to accusations of bias by automating the process of selecting the news to be featured.

DO NO EVIL?

According to many reports, including a January Wired Magazine feature, Google abides by and has prospered as a result of a simple rule: do no evil. (That and strong technology) The blogging community, closely watching developments, clearly hopes that's still the case.

Another significant concern involves users of other blogging services and whether or not Google will show preference for Blogger-generated pages.

“My initial concern, which is an issue that can't really be debated either way until we've seen some changes to the service, is that any special benefits afforded Blogger's sites will privilege them in the Google index over non-Blogger weblogs,” said Dash.

Added Dash: “most of the arguments that people have made so far about improving Google's index by owning Blogger and BlogSpot are ones that would make more sense when applied to weblogs as a whole. Having deeper links to one tool's output doesn't make any more sense with blogger than it would if Google had a deeper index of pages created by FrontPage or by BBEdit or by DreamWeaver.”

Blogger briefly addressed such concerns in its posted FAQ: “The people at Google have done a great job over the years making sure their search results are honest and objective and there’s no reason why they would change that policy for Blogger or anyone else.”

“My concerns are those of someone who values the weblog software ecosystem,” said Webb. “If Google extract a lot of value from weblogs, they're milking the whole weblog community.”

Webb, like many other members of the blogging community, appreciates the effort that people put into “weblog readers, aggregators, Daypop's WordBursts, reading suggestions, etc.”

He added: “If people feel like they're being taken for a ride, like what they do is just feeding into a profit-making company, they'll go elsewhere. If this happens, Google better give something back; I think they know this, and I think they'll do it.”

When asked what Google could give back, Webb replied that they could advance the way weblog data is handled -- “not just Blogger data, but every weblog they scrape - in an analogous way to the Google API lets people build interesting apps on top of the Google www database and search results.”

Dash summed up what’s on the mind of many bloggers: “I'm just hoping that it's clear that the value is in their links, content, and networking, not in the tool that creates them, and not in a subset of the entire realm of weblogs.”

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posted by me

:: 6:00:00 PM [+] ::
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