Doc Searls comments on Google Blog Search

Doc Searls, a member of the Technorati Advisory Board and Editor of Linux Journal has written an interesting piece on Google Blog Search. In it, he says:

A few minutes ago I spoke to Jason Goldman, who runs both Blogger and Blog Search at Google. Rather than predicting the death of competitors in the Live Web space, he said he expected it to become energized and to grow.

I think Jason's right. As I noted in an earlier post, too much of the time, money and effort of otherwise innovative blogosphere infrastructure providers has gone into vain attempts to build "little Googles" focused on the Blogosphere. It should have been obvious to everyone that eventually the "big boys" (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.) would reclaim their turf and provide the same leadership in retrospective blog search that they do in traditional web search. My hope is that innovators and startups will refocus themselves on doing really new and different things -- try to push beyond the obvious and figure out what is really useful!

One of the interesting aspects of Google's entry into the world of Blog Search is that they have announced (informally) that they will soon be hosting a FeedMesh node! That means that they, like Yahoo!, PubSub, and others, will soon be sharing information about all the blog updates they discover. The result of this is that we'll all be able to focus our competitive efforts on what we do with syndicated data -- not just on how much of it we have. We'll all have the same data -- but some of us will do more interesting and useful things with it! The innovation that results should be of great benefit for end users while also opening up new areas for business and service development.

I think Google's entry into the blog search space will be remembered as a real "watershed" moment for the blogosphere. Now, we're moving into a new phase -- a much more interesting phase.

bob wyman

Comments

[the english guy]

I welcome Google's entry and I agree, it will energize the market. Up until now it has been a point oft repeated, that many regular internet users don't know what blogs are, or even sometimes when they come across one they don't know it is one. Google can add some direction to this, bringing it more mainstream and forefront.

[Benoit Brookens]

I think google will definitely fiercen the competition for the marketshare, and I believe this will bring some innovation to the community as a whole.