Google deal is leverage with Weblogs

A lot of heat but not much light was shed last week with disclosure of Google's acquisition of a leading Weblog provider, Pyra Labs.

Although most Web-watchers reacted enthusiastically to the deal, what I found most interesting was Google's lack of explanation. There were a few mumbles about potential synergies and future opportunities, but trust me: Google would not buy Pyra without a plan.

If the plan is to become the Web's leading information provider, however, there's not much point in bruiting it about to potential competitors like newspapers and broadcasters. There isn't much money in Weblogs. But there is probably a lot of money in aggregating and leveraging Weblogs in concert with other information sources.

Weblogs, for the uninitiated, are personal journals (a term I prefer to diaries) published on the Internet. They're essentially Web sites but differ by being almost all text and by being updated often, sometimes every few minutes. They tend to contain little original content beyond musings and commentaries, but what they're good at is immediacy — so-called real-time information — and at linking, whether it be to published articles, e-mail threads, other Weblogs or whatever.

The power of blogs, as they're nicknamed, comes from the Web's one-to-many publishing capabilities. A number of blogs are fed into RSS (Rich Site Summary), a technology for distributing news blurbs throughout the Internet on a subscription basis. Blogs can act as a de facto news filter for Web users.

Google's interest in blogs sharpened once it began indexing them on a regular basis. What blogs became useful for was first, tracking down links, and second, measuring what was hot on the Web at any given moment. Bloggers tend to link to one another, so a topic or theme that a leading blogger promotes can create a quick Internet buzz.

For that reason, blogs are a good reference for measuring a story's impact. In some cases, blogs will beat print and broadcast to major news. The obvious example was Sept. 11, 2001, when the only way to tell what was going on at street level was through bloggers posting updates in the minutes and hours after the tragedy. Bloggers also are credited with drawing early attention to Trent Lott's racist comments before they made mainstream headlines.

Fittingly, a blogger — San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor — first reported the Google-Pyra deal to the public. In another example, Weblogs linked to and commented on Dave Stutz's incendiary "retirement" letter to Microsoft days before newspapers published stories about it.

Several newspapers and magazines have sponsored their own blogs. But many have shied away, fearful that blogs pose competition or fail to meet journalistic reporting standards.

Google's deal should raise blogging's profile among established media, however. The way Google makes money — through advertising and search services — is the way print and broadcast media will have to make money if they expect to grow their businesses on the Web.

In blogging, Google is getting a lot of information and human resources at very low cost (terms of the Pyra deal were not disclosed but it is a small, six-person company). Almost all blogs are free. And they link to other free content. Linking to publications that charge for content throws a monkey wrench into the blog value proposition, so you find few Wall Street Journal stories linked on blogs, for example.

Eventually, as the Web figures out a way to charge small amounts on a per-use basis, linking will generate revenue on its own. For now, though, blogs provide a huge public service when you consider the collective publishing prowess of an estimated half a million to 1 million active sites.

Google's acquisition of Pyra may reap surprises, but it wasn't done on a lark. Through Pyra it gets behind-the-curtain access to a powerful technology, to the Web's cerebral cortex and to a ready conduit for providing its own blogging service.

But blogging in and of itself is just another avenue for enabling Google to become the informational equivalent of a mass medium on the Web.

Paul Andrews is a free-lance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.