The latest move in weblogs’ march towards broader recognition and use is Google buying Blogger. As the article mentions, Lycos as already gone in that direction not long ago and AOL is thinking of it but don’t forget Salon’s effort that came before them. (Hat tip to Bill)
More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear.
Update: Matt Haughey is probably on to something.
I could see google’s search results getting incredibly timely if links bloggers point to are used to determine results (instead of the content of posts itself). So, say a couple weeks ago, at 9:15AM EST you searched for “space shuttle” at google. Not only would you get standard nasa pages up near the top, but you’d also get the breaking story link. Perhaps the very first report at CNN or the florida newspaper sites would peak instantly, based on the (internal to google) datapoint that 50 bloggers pointed to it in the last ten minutes.
This could be quite interesting, and be a sort of uber-daypop fueling googlebots and google search, based on the links within blog content instead of just blog content itself.