Posted by Guest:
You should take a look at the google patent, and learn about distributed trust networks. There are plenty of papers on this topic. Google figured out that the web is actually one gigantic database, and that a distributed trust network could be used to decide which parts are important and which parts are not.

This same formula applies to google news, and obviously blogging. I am not convinced that they’ll have much more information about blogging by actually owning the service, compared to just spidering it.