OPINION
Google jumps feet-first into blogging
21-02-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
With its acquisition of Pyra Labs, Google.com has made personal Web logs (blogs) part of the mainstream Internet landscape.
Blogging, short for Web logging, became a trendy thing to do for millions of people in 2002. Using tools like Pyra's Blogger, Movable Type or Radio Userland, users can write and publish on-line almost as quickly as a thought strikes.
Some detractors thought blogging would sputter out as a trend. Instead, the practice of publishing Web logs has become as commonplace as e-mail. Families blog their genealogy and their travel photos. Irish company NewBay has software for blogging from a mobile phone.
Google's entry into this space effectively launches the third wave of blogging. The move expands Google's universally popular Web-search service. It follows Google's acclaimed Google News Service, Google's Image Search and Google's archiving of Usenet discussion groups.
Analysts have no idea how Google might make money with its newly acquired Blogger service.
The same thoughts bounced around five years ago when Microsoft jumped right into the middle of the war for browser standards. Today, Microsoft owns the browser standard but there's no clear revenue stream directly from that ownership.
"Google is a good search engine and blogging tool. We don't know how they will connect them yet," said Dave Winer, long-time blogging developer for Radio Userland. "I bet they don't either."
Winer's Radio has a subscription model, just like Google's Blogger. Still under development, Blogger Pro offers some enhanced features for an annual membership fee of USD35 per year. That price will probably increase to USD50 per year.
"Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation," said David Krane, Google's director of corporate communication in an e-mail message.
As a communications tool, blogging offers more connectivity to extended Web communities than simple personal Web-publishing services such as Yahoo's Geocities and Terra-Lycos' Tripod.
"Personal home pages have been around for years," says Irish blogger Gavin Sheridan from GavinsBlog.com. "It's really just vanity publishing when you have a personal Web site. And once you've done a Web site, it's a real pain to keep it updated. Blogging makes that much easier."
Google also makes it easy to find blog content by topic, using traditional search functions at Google's main site. Google owes its swelling popularity to deft algorithms that quickly divine what's useful on the Web. Google's electronic spiders crawl through intricate linkages that dynamically exist on blogs, following specific structures like permalinks, blog titles, and daily popularity index ratings. Once Google detects that a specific blog is updated every day, that blog's content gets indexed into Google within three days of uploading it to the Web. Then Google crawls the entire blog every 28 days.
Blogs have emerged on mainstream sites, with developers from Microsoft, Macromedia, Groove Networks and Jupiter Media publishing blogs related to their research. Known as knowledge logs (k-logs), these islands of information often reveal upcoming changes in direction of products and services.
With Google rowing in behind blogging, the practice of blogging will become a respectable activity. That's because people trust Google. In January 2003, Google topped a survey by a British branding agency as the brand that most impacted people's lives in 2002. It beat out more entrenched brand names such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks.
And Google has the resources to promote itself in the blogging world. Although Google is not a public company, it is believed that the company raked in profits of USD100 million on USD300 million of sales last year. It attracts more than 60 million unique users a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, who also notes that "Google" has become a verb. More than 30 million visitors google from outside of the US. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.
Google's absorbing of Blogger will kick off a string of similar acquisitions by other Internet players. AOL, MSN and Yahoo will move into the blogging game, in much the same way they all got into the instant messaging business years ago. This means that Irish bloggers using Moveable Type, Radio Userland and Live Journal may find themselves paying subscriptions to a big Internet service.
Blogging is no longer a simple cultural phenomenon. With Google behind the concept, blogging now becomes a fixture of the Internet's infrastructure. Those who still don't recognise the term will begin handing out personal blog addresses alongside with their e-mail addresses.
So if you want to be among the first 100 Irish to have a blog, you need to avoid the mass stampede that will follow Google's entry to the blogging world.
Bernie Goldbach's blog is Underway in Ireland.
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