The big buzz this sunday morning is the acquisition of Pyra (the Blogger company) by Google. At this writing, no major news source (at least according to Google News) has published anything. However, there’s ample commentary on hundreds of weblogs and on SlashDot.
Befitting the occasion, Pyra founder Evan Williams blogged the news live from a session at the Live from the Blogosphere conference.
Blogger hosts more than one million weblogs, of which a few hundred thousand are actively updated. Half a year ago, when starting this weblog, I did some tests with Blogger but was frustrated by the lack of control over some things, and the relatively frequent downtime.
Tons of commentaries and analyses are already out. Oblomovka makes an interesting point:
Google buys Internet stuff it doesn’t want to go away
also citing Google’s buyout of Deja, a company that archived NNTP newsgroups.
Dan Gillmor has a good overview, noting the recent announcement of weblogging facilities by Tripod (Terra/Lycos) and the possibility of AOL doing the same in the near future.
Nick Denton asks:
…will Google use weblog links to improve Google News? Right now, news stories are selected by an algorithm which counts the number of similar stories, and promotes widespread items. The results are occasionally strange, and usually bland. A system which analyses inbound links from weblogs would produce a much better selection.
Google apparently wants to harness weblogger’s data mining and analysis to improve its own services, a very shrewd move. However, they need to do so without alienating other weblogging companies.
Clearly Blogger-hosted weblogs will be scanned and fed into Google indexes immediately, rather than after a delay that today ranges from hours to days. My guess is that, soon after getting a grasp of what can be done which this setup, they’ll offer plug-ins for software like Movable Type, and URLs which home-built weblogs can ping, to enter information from non-Blogger weblogs into their system.
Ben Hammersley writes:
Google lives or dies on fresh links – and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google’s network: it’d be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It’s a distributed early warning system for Google’s spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google’s staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.
Update: Tons of comments already out at MetaFilter. As well as more name suggestions: Booger 
, Goggler…
