Information Research Weblog

Interesting news buzzing around the Web this weekend, started, it seems by Dan Gillmor, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, whose item was published today (Sunday 16th February 2003), but who released the story on Saturday night, with the result of course, that it was 'blogged' here, there and everywhere, before you could say 'Bill Gates'.

And the news? Simply that Google has bought the San Francisco company Pyra Labs, the producers of the Blogger software and the associated Weblog services.

There is an obvious synergy between the two systems, in that Google will be able, presumably, to underpin the Blogger Weblogs with its search engine - perhaps enabling a search across all of the Weblogs actually maintained on Pyra's servers - or, on Google's, since, as a result of the deal, Pyra will be moving them on to Google's servers.

I imagine, however, that there is a bigger draw, in that Google moves into a new market, which will, perhaps, pull customers who buy Blogger software to buy Google as an associated search engine. Weblogs are also instant publishing tools, which can be used for much more than the Weblogs and I imagine that some folk at Google will have ideas about what else might be done - ready publishing of in-house company newspapers, perhaps? Insinuating Google into more companies as an intranet search engine as a result? Using it as an e-publishing tool generally for netzines and e-books - all with Google as the search engine?

Pyra Labs has 1.1 million registered users and estimate that about 200,000 are actively running Weblogs - I imagine that that number will grow rapidly as Google moves to gain from its acquisition.