Weblogs are going Googling.
Google, which runs the Web’s premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.
The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.
“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn’t discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the “resources to build on the vision I’ve been working on for years.” — Dan Gillmor, siliconvalley.com
Gillmor has a nice set of blinks to commentary on this development from the weblogging community. It may give more credibility to weblog content, and users of Blogger like myself may get better technical support from the bevy of Google web engineers, and certainly Evan Williams will be sitting pretty getting one of those dotcom buyout windfalls that seem to have become a thing of the past. But I worry about the smell of oligopoly here, and how the little independent weblogger will fare in the corporate blogging environment. Certanly more immediacy to the need to study Google’s threat to privacy now…
