Hammersley on Google on Blogger

As usual, some interesting thoughts from Ben Hammersley on Google and Blogger:

Well, crikey: Google bought Blogger. This is tremendously interesting news. Lets look at it from both sides:

What does it mean for Blogger?

Well, thats easy. Security. They’re moving all the blogspot hosting over to Google’s machines - which, well, don’t go down as often - and putting Google’s cash behind them. Letting Ev worry more about the code and less about the finances will be a blessing.

What does it mean for Google?

This one’s the tricky bit. At first glance it seems weird: Google don’t charge for anything at the moment, and suddenly they’re running Blogger Pro. But somehow I don’t think they’re in it for the billing system. No: I think it’s to do with the hosting. Compared to hosting the Google Cache, hosting Blogger will be simple, so it’s a cheap investment for what they get:

Google lives or dies on fresh links - and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google’s network: it’d be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It’s a distributed early warning system for Google’s spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google’s staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.
Source: BenHammersley.Com
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