Nick has found a reason for me to keep my Washington voter's registration for a little while longer: Washington ballot initiative 831. It makes a statement about the problems of the initiative system and the idiocy of Tim Eyman at the same time. I'm very impressed.
Isioma Daniel, whose column three months ago set off religious riots in Nigeria, tells her story in the Guardian. "Nothing justified a religious group killing people simply because they considered a remark offensive. Who did they think they were? God? Surely God can fight his own battles." (from Neil Gaiman)
On Saturday night, Dan Gillmor broke the story that Google is buying Pyra Labs. Pyra is the company behind Blogger, which is the most widely used weblog software.
I have to say I'm a bit confused by the purchase. It's great news for Evan Williams and the rest of Pyra, who were struggling to make any money despite having over a million registered users. They suffered from the same problems as many other Internet software companies -- it's easy to get people to register, but it's darn near impossible to get them to pay. Especially when the same product can be had for free elsewhere.
So my congratulations go to Pyra, but I'm a little bewildered by what Google gets from this. Many people are saying that they now can update their index immediately when a Blogger blog is updated, but they didn't need to buy Pyra to do that. All Pyra needed for that was an API into Google, and that's trivial for Google to do at a far lower cost than the low amount they likely paid for the company. Heck, Pyra probably would have paid Google for that kind of connection if Pyra had any money.
Instead, Google gets ownership of a growing community of content creators. That's great, but Google doesn't do content creation; it does search. What do you do with a community of creators of esoteric content? In Yahoo's experience with Geocities, not much. In Homestead's experience with its products, not much. Ditto for Tripod, and for every other free web page company. Yes, weblogs get more repeat traffic today than personal web pages did in 1998, but traffic to weblogs isn't going to improve Google's search capabilities.
The only thing which comes to mind is that Google will now sell the advertising on Blogger sites. Google's AdWords program has shown that they can make money off of ads better than just about any other company, and now they have about 200,000 extra sites (the active Blogger pages) on which to practice that trade. Of course, it's not clear how well webloggers will appreciate having AdWords-style ads on their sites, since the ads will likely be keyed to each page's content. I don't know that I'd want any company's ad running across the top of this page, and I certainly wouldn't want ads from Apple, Sun, or Microsoft here.
I'm not sure what else Google might have in mind, unless it wants to move into content creation. If that's the intention, I don't think it's likely to be a successful strategy, since you can't mobilize a community whose only commonality is the software they use. Either Google has thought of something that nobody commenting on this transaction has in mind, or in a couple of years they're going to wonder why they saddled themselves with a million customers when they'd never dealt with normal consumers as real customers before.