Google, Pyra and Weblogs

As developers of another weblogging tool, we, of course, are following Google's acquisition of Pyra (and Blogger) rather closely.

Most of the weblog conversation since Dan Gillmor broke the news has been rightly congratulatory of Pyra and expectably inquisitive of Google's strategies. While at this point in time we're all still only speculating (the key word is speculation) based on our own assumptions and opinions, it is only natural to consider what Google wants out of the deal.

Let's just make the obvious assumption that Google wants Blogger's content.

For a moment, I will try to think as a weblogger or weblog observer and not a weblog developer with a slight conflict of interest.

If I were Google, getting access to the weblog content of Blogger users would be just a start. To truly integrate weblog metadata, Google needs to expand that content base. And in fact, Google's acquisition of Deja, and subsequent creation of Google Groups, may provide a model for that: When Google acquired Deja, they only got access to about 6 years of Usenet history. But with the help of Usenet archivists they were able to piece together the entire history back to 1981. Of course, that's a slightly different situation -- there they were working with old, never-changing content, whereas in the case of weblogs, they'll need continuing access to new content.

Cory raises similar points in an essay on boingboing.net:

If Google is able to index every Blogger post (and, one presumes, every message-board post, once the feature is integrated), that's great news for Blogger users, but it won't be as powerful as the other blogmining tools until and unless it can do the same for anyone who publishes something that is self-identified as a "blog."

This assumes Google's chief preoccupation is to trek deeper into the blog mine instead of pursuing different ventures such as a GoogleID system. That is not to say that they aren't interested in doing both.

Regardless, the purchase has made an already active space even more exciting and we can only imagine that there will be a flurry of developments in the upcoming months.