More on Google Blog
Neil Macintosh in the Guardian takes a similar view to yesterday's piece, but raises something that a couple of other commentators have mentioned.

This could create friction. Some net users already suggest Google is becoming too powerful, too much a gatekeeper to the net's riches. This news is hardly likely to allay their fears: will the dominant search engine start discriminating against Weblogs run on Moveable Type systems, or those hosted at UserLand?

Wont happen. Yes Google will experiment with the Blogger archive but a great deal of stuff there is already in the same category as Deja News/ Newsgroups. Useful Archive. The real value of the Blogosphere is its near real time ability to process information into knowledge via its reputation and commentary. By default the Blogger archive is the biggest, but by deficiency (mostly of funding - where WERE all those clever venture capitalists who could "get" Pets.com but missed blog?) much of the Blogosphere now exists on other systems like LJ and Moveable Type. If Google wants to maintain its business, it will have to make their contents available or it will lose its credibility which is founded on its impartiality.

Google Gold should start generating some of the useful tools we want, preferably OS so they can percolate through the community and make the Google reliability and completeness meme even stronger. I have a wish list here.

Perhaps its worth remembering too that Google has bought another archive and a publishing tool, it has notbought a publisher of any content at all. I hear Salon is going for a song, but, for perfectly good reasons, Google doesn't want it.