Reactions to the Google-Blogger deal

Dave Winer is, predictably, somewhat cynical. (After all, he sells a rival product.):

“What did Google buy? Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn’t buy their content, because Pyra doesn’t own it, the users do. They didn’t buy access to the content because they already had it. The purpose of Blogger is to publish stuff, in other words to make it publicly available. Google’s search engine routinely indexes Blogger sites, along with Manila, Radio UserLand and Movable Type sites. It doesn’t know the difference.

Blogger is not open source, in fact ordinary people can’t even purchase a binary license, so there’s probably the reason they did the deal — to get the source for Blogger, which is now written in Java, and to license it to their corporate users, along with the Google search appliance, which goes for about $25K per box. If this is true, then you will be able to add, say, $1K to the price of the box and get a copy of Blogger along with the search engine, allowing people to create weblogs on a local network. This is very important for business use of weblogs, which is growing now at a fast clip. However, Google will find this is already a competitive market, UserLand already offers a deeper product, Manila, as does Movable Type, another leading competitor….”.

Forbes thinks that “that the blogging as a cultural phenomenon is about to enter a new phase in its growth. Those who last year had never heard of it will start handing out personal blog Web addresses alongside with their e-mail addresses. And that means that along with nearly everything else about the Internet, the mild cachet that came with being among the first to publish a blog will quickly evaporate with the mass stampede that follows….”.

Dan Gillmor sees it as a big boost for Blogging.

Other comments here and here plus an interview with Evan Williams (Blogger’s founder). Douglas Rushkoff is not entirely delighted.