Bloogle's Annotated Web
Dave thinks Bloogle will be focused on serving enterprises, but implementing weblogs in the enterprise doesn't fit Google's appliance model (yet). Bloogle has been blogged to death in more ways than one, but Im still offering my take -- that they will fulfill the dream of the Annotated Web and corner the market on free micro-content.
The Google acquisition of Pyra -- makers of the most widely-used weblog platform, Blogger -- left those unacquainted with weblogs scratching their heads. When weblogs first appeared a few years ago they seemed like just another method of building vanity websites. But the technology and social norms that have grown out of these simple publishing tools have changed dramatically. Real people are now engaged in building the Web, not just consuming it, creating a larger opportunity for Google than search alone.
A weblog is the simplest way to produce a website -- for publishing, communication and collaboration -- through standards-based structured data exchange in a spam-free medium. These simple tools with simple rules yield complex results. Google is tapping into a new form of social infrastructure, and perhaps returning to its roots.
Google co-founder Larry Page in a recent talk: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank...Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation."
This vision of an Annotated Web where people make editorial judgments on content has existed in blogspace for some time now. Every blogger develops a link-rich annotated resource. People still outperform technology in qualitative decisions. The problem is people don't scale and not all judgments are equal (Third Voice was an attempt at the Annotated Web, but couldn’t discern which annotations were relevant). Google knows how to scale and already uses weblogs as a source of dynamic link-rich judgment to inform PageRank. Tapping into the natural intelligence of people to enhance the relevancy and meaning of search results is low hanging fruit, but there is more to this opportunity.
What Pyra and weblog platforms (Moveable Type, Radio and others) do really well is make publishing simple and affordable. Creating a post is as simple as using a WYSIWYG editor and clicking a button. Posts are structured in reverse chronological order, easy for readers to comprehend and writers to recall. Each post is also formatted in an XML specification called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), which allows other bloggers to subscribe to posts in a news aggregator that scans in P2P fashion for updates once an hour. This open innovation has spawned others bundled aggregators/editors, Topic Exchange for group forming and Technorati and Daypop.
At Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference on decentralized technologies (including weblogs), Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to an audience of bloggers by agreeing to work with weblog platforms to accept ping notifications of new posts. The potential to synchronize and syndicate annotation posts to a service like Google News is a timely service and a model for the Web to come. The Google/Blogger combo (Bloogle?) can also distribute annotations, relevancy and AdWords to the Blogger Weblog platform to put each post in context. Bloogle is becoming a platform for the production, marketing and distribution of micro-content.
Predicting what Bloogle evolves into matters less than how weblogs are engaging people in a two-way Web. Google may dominate search and publishing, and others with follow, but weblogs as communication and collaboration platforms still remain open opportunities.
Not all links are created equal. Links between blogs are also conversations within social and creative networks. This social infrastructure, denser and more purposeful communities than newsgroups underpinned by real relationships, is very different from the information infrastructure that is Google and Blogger’s core competency. When people are engaged in the Web beyond being consumers the real opportunities arise.
9:59:47 AM 
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