Google Buy Blogger - Of Course
I have no idea why Google chose Blogger than any one of a dozen equally, or more effective Blogging businesses, that is a business decision. But it is pretty clear why they would do that.

The breathless story from Dan Gillmor does all the usual, but invalid stuff about the Internet.

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago, Google bought Deja. com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet newsgroups, Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net.

But now, Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called ``a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.''
and yadda yadda yadda.

All that may be true but I don't believe it. This is not about "content" and Google isn't interested in "content", the news service is the result of the reliability that Google brings to other people's resource and content and the Blogger deal is the next stage in the development of Googling the net.

Think about it, Google's king hit is PageRank which generates highly reliable sources of whatever kind of information you ask for, based on search terms generated by idiots like you and me. Bloggers have developed a whole new set of tools that is making the reliability of information much higher and is using human massively distributed human resources to find and rank that information very quickly.

A story hits the net and the Blogosphere, using newsreaders, Blogs with Trackback links and the usual power rule processes of the network evaluates that information and weaves it into it proper place in the knowledge universe very quickly.

By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because, can I say it again, Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information. That's what I mean by an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest.

I've said for a long time that Google is not a search engine. Yes, it spiders, but that's not what it does. Now I have Larry Page's word for it.

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

Here's another bit that makes so much more sense than most people get.

Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.

Get it? Google surveys the free part of the web. Everyone wants to be on Google, because if you aren't in Google you don't exist. So you had better be free, and good, and referenced, and linked to the universe, or you don't exist and if you don't exist you sure as hell don't do business. Can we call that part of the debate settled please?

To extend the discussion, have a look at SearchDay By Chris Sherman for some of the more practical, business oriented and applications of the Bloogle Empire.