Bloogle? Byoogle?
The blogging news of the weekend is that Google has bought Pyra, the company that provides this Blogger software. The story was broken by Dan Gillmor on Saturday in his blog. Ev's blog about selling the company's here. Steve Jenson, a self-confessed geek that works on Blogger and elsewhere, said on Saturday that, "this won't mean a big change for existing users [...]; Blogger isn't going anywhere, our plan to get lots of new features out the door, new versions of the product, better support, etc, are only strengthened by this new development. One thing this will mean is lots more servers, more resources, and more coworkers to help out with everything! I'm really excited; things are going to rock. Heck, things are starting to rock already."

So, some issues.

Will Blogger get better? I expect so. I'm looking forward to the day that commenting becomes part of the package, avoiding the need for Bloggers to integrate third party packages.

Second, will Blogger get rebadged with a moniker appropriate to the Google farm (Froogle etc)? Byoogle? Bloogle?

Finally, what's in it for Google? Well as Tony Pierce points out, "if Google had a faster access to blogs, it would have seen all the activity [other people's blogs] pointing to Gillmor's blog, and to the Merc article [by Gillmor], and to Ev's page [blog] and would have basically figured out that it's news." So will this finally change the nature of news (the eternal 'it's a blog but is it journalism' issue).

One thing is certain: the move will certainly fuel the debate as to whether Google aims to 'roole the world', and whether global domination by Google would be a good or bad thing.