The weblog community has been buzzing furiously this weekend at the news of Google's purchase of Blogger. The internet's most trusted brand will bring blogging into the mainstream (where, in any case, the phenomenon was surely headed).
In an insightful analysis, new media journalist Neil McIntosh identifies the positive consequences of the takeover -- real-time searches of blogs; greater recognition for the community -- before tackling the potential downsides:
The main fear among users of software or services other than Blogger (I'm one of those: this site runs on Movable Type, while my personal diary is at Diaryland) is that their sites will not feature as highly in Google's search results. They also worry that thier blogs' contents will not be indexed as regularly as those running on Blogger (which has 1.1 million registered users).
The playing field among bloggers was already unfair, with several A-list" blogs having huge numbers of hits, while the majority fight it out for a much more modest number of visits. Until now, however, such inequality was shown to be a mathematical consequence of the way the web works (ahh, so *that's* why there are little or no comments on this site!).
But Google's entry into the arena could change the "blogosphere". While the world's favourite search engine has won success on the back of its reputation for integrity, there are nevertheless those who disapprove of the closely-guarded code Google uses to "rank" web pages. And, as Lawrence Lessig has long pointed out, on the internet, "code is law".
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