Salocin

Google. Pyra. Weblogs Take Over the World?

I tried to resist commenting on the Google/Blogger/Pyra thing because everyone seemed to be doing it, and it's (in my opinion) a storm in a teacup, but when I saw this article at the BBC News Website, I couldn't hold myself back any longer!

It's not that I want to deride weblogs in any way (let's face it, the heading of this category on my website is "weblog"!), but I think the media is getting a little out of hand about the whole weblog "phenomenon".

Even the use of the word "Phenomenon" seems a little over the top to me - it's not that wondrous that it needs a word last used as a title to a film where John Travolta is capable of moving objects with his mind. Weblogs are the marriage of peoples public journals with the ability to make them widely available for free. Reading some of the recent press, you'd think they were about to change the underlying fabric of worldwide social order.

Take a look at how the BBC describe weblogs : There are millions of blogs on the web and they are often interlinked, creating an eco-system of ever-changing ideas on the net.

Ecosystem? I read blogs a lot of the time, and I have found precious few links that allow a browser to read numerous opinions on an aspect of current events. The strongest links I have found are the authors who, struggling for content, go to sites that provide questions that stimulate pseudo-deep thought users can then put on their weblog. Sometimes the questions are quite interesting, but this hardly creates an "ecosystem" of ideas, whatever that is.

Google buying Pyra is nothing more than diversification for growth, as Weblogs have a fair bit in common with the way Google likes to see itself - a little less corporate than the MSNs and AOLs of this world. I'm sure some corporate wonk in some back room is waxing lyrical on the subject of "tapping into the flow of uninhibited journalistic reflection" or something similarly trite, but at the end of the day, it's growth, pure and simple.

So I was simmering quietly in the corner waiting for it all to blow over, when this article comes up, and I find out that an Irish company is creating a service where its users can update their weblogs with text messages and photos taken by their telephone, by calling a special number. In order to keep my gripes about this article in some sort of order, I'll try to respond to specific quotes...

The latest trend is moblogging - updating your blog with a mobile phone.

So it's a trend, is it?. A Google search for "moblogging" provides little insight into this "trend". A couple of sites (this one or this one) know what it's all about, but I get no sense that this is the next craze to take over the world...

There are an estimated 500,000 people who run blogs and analysts say a quarter of them may eventually update their sites on the go.

Are these the same analysts that told us that almost everyone would be online by 2004, that the bookstore was dead and that the underlying fundamentals of the economy had permanently shifted? I remember them desperately trying to dislodge their foot from their mouth when the e-economy failed to materialize, and it turned out the only people who had made a cent from the entire horrible mess were the investment banks, their privileged customers (who were in on stage one of each IPO) and the companies writing the dodgy forecasts? This prediction sounds just like the ones we heard before, no doubt based on solid assumptions which, when looked at collectively, wouldn't fool a 5-year-old. Can you imagine typing in an entry on a 10-digit keypad? Even with text prediction? Perhaps with a palmpilot, but even then I doubt very much that people are going to be doing this in the near future, perhaps in 10 years or more, if a whole lot of other technologies (such as voice recognition) don't get there first!

Mr Holahan predicts it will transform our relationship with the internet and put billions of bloggers online.

Mr. Holahan is, by the way, the CEO of NewBay Software, the company implementing the new mobile blogging functionality in Ireland. Does the ability to update a website over a mobile phone really sound like paradigm-shifting technology? It is as profound as, say, the advent of broadband, or the creation of the first browser and website at CERN? I think that what will transform our relationship with the internet next will be the ability to search for content in a manner that bypasses all the rubbish sites that use keywords they shouldn't to grab the attention of unsuspecting digital passers-by. I doubt very much whether the ability to publish easily will transform the internet. People mostly browse the internet, rather than publish to it, and its so easy to publish already that I don't believe making it any easier is going to result in a transformation of much at all.

"In two year's time every phone user will have a website and be using blogs as their version of the world," he said.

The Oracle at Delphi no doubt made more sense. To the extent that weblogs reflect the news at all, they contain uncorroborated reports written by people who are mostly inexperienced and/or untrained in journalism (I certainly have no qualifications in that area). They're the ultimate free-market in platforms for speech - they benefit from being extremely easy to set up and update, but have the associated feature of being extremely numerous, resulting in a signal-to-noise ratio so high, it's likely only the most radical opinions will make themselves felt. If weblogs take off in this direction, its more likely they will end up commenting on an authoritative source, just as I have cited the BBC (which I usually think is great) in this article.

"Google's buy is a recognition that the news in future will be reported by ordinary people with their own particular bias on stories," said Mr Holahan.

That remains to be seen. I think that Google's buy reflects the fact that some businessmen believe there's money to be made in the Weblog space, or in its combination with something else. It's also a reflection of the fact that effective though it may be, Google doesn't have a business model that scales up much further than it already has. If they want to carry on growing, they have to grow into a new space, hence their move into images and the old usenet newsgroups. I don't believe Google is buying Pyra because it believes weblogging is the future of newscasting, although it will certainly do their share price no harm if that opinion is widely reported.