Dan Gillmor's eJournal reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs, the company that built Blogger and runs blogspot.com.
In a sense, this move follows in the footsteps of their acquisition of DejaNews.com and recent creation of Google News. If news and commentary are indeed becoming more distributed, then these acquisitions provide both insurance of continuing relevance as a search company and a potential back door option into news and content distribution. Buying the most popular blogging tools vendor makes sense from this point of view, even if its tools are not the strongest in technical terms.
Other implications fall into several categories. One is somewhat - it ups the odds on Dave Winer winning his $2,000 bet: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site." Some of us would consider the buyout good news on this basis alone.
Yet it also heralds a period of uncertainty for the field as a whole. Several large service and content providers are working on or looking at blog-related features of their own, and blogging tool vendors are not financially strong. Which means one can bet on some acquisitions by the likes of Yahoo, AOL et. al. I for one don't expect Movable Type (which runs Winds of Change.NET), to retain its independence into 2004.
Which brings in the spectre of proprietary changes to blogging software that begins to do things like interfere with XML feeds et. al., or ties it to other platforms (most likely bet: instant messaging). If the fragmentation of techincal and authentication standards that have plagued the browser and instant messaging worlds comes to blogging, we'll all be the poorer for it. This is an issue that will deserve bloggers' future attention and vocal support.
In the short term, however, outcomes are clearer - and happier. Blog*Spot will move onto Google's infrastructure setup. For the sake of all our colleagues on Blog*Spot, we certainly hope this makes the service more reliable and robust. It will also be a boon to many bloggers in countries like Iran, and that's more good news for all of us. Let's just hope that at some point, Google also takes on the issue of Blogger's security (or lack thereof).
Final thought: Ev has put in a tremendous amount of hard work, and Blogger is changing the face of news and politics. Many of us live our lives hoping that along the way, something we do might make a real and positive difference to the world around us. Ev achieved it. For him to get paid in real terms as well is a final act of justice worthy of celebration.
Congratulations, Ev!
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