The two most important things on the web are publishing and searching.
Three and a half years ago when I stepped off the plane at SFO with my carpetbag, I had two meetings lined up, one with Autonomy and one with Evan Williams from Pyra, a search behemoth and a tiny publishing (actually collaboration software) startup. Pyra was more exciting.
Evan and Meg Hourihan had developed a product that was designed for people who needed to update websites often and easily. To do this they had to produce a beautifully elegant piece of software. Blogger along with Manila seemed to point to something profound, what happens when the web becomes two-way.
Weblog publishing tools allow you to create embedded meaning within documents and they embed that meaning where it is relevant – in the nugget of information that is published as opposed to a web page. RSS syndication and the virtuous circle of searching syndicated content, publishing commentary and re-syndicating content, allow for the beginnings of a whole new way of interacting with the web. They are the foundation stones of the mythical semantic web.
So will an acquisition allow Blogger to flourish? There are a myriad of opportunities for a symbiotic relationship between search and publishing, but Google is now a medium sized company that is focused on ad revenue not cool web applications. For all that, at the very least, realtime search of weblogs will complement news search and Google had the sense to do something here. I just hope they don’t produce a weblog product called Booger.
Well done Pyra – and well done Google.