(2003-02-16) Google Buys Pyra Blogger

Google is buying Py Ra/Blogger.

I haven't read any great ideas about the combination yet. I'm hoping something comes up. My fear, contra Dave Winer's optimism , is that this is a dumb-ass prepare-for-IPO game. Went through this at MedScape. First we bought a lame-o company just for his prior-year's revenue ("track record"), then, because our focus on physicians as a target audience didn't sound hockey-stickish enough, we pissed away millions creating a consumer content business. Dance, puppet, dance! (But I could be wrong, of course.)

I wonder whether there will be a Google Box that includes a protected Intranet WebLog server (Phil Wolff had the same thought). Given Blogger's architecture (MsWindows, MsSqlServer) that probably wouldn't be simple. (Also, companies/teams should use Wiki For CollaborationWare!)

Brad De Long quotes Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations (Annotation Systems). We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. Rainer Brockerhoff connects that to Blogger, which makes sense. Google could make it really easy to write an annotation for every item you read via Google/search. Then those could be viewed by URL, or else the by-person view becomes their blog! The problem is that this system probably shouldn't be centralized in Google's hands. The architecture of annotations hasn't been resolved yet...