I never really write about blogging, but the bandwagon is too irresistible right now. The current hype about blogs is akin to the hype surrounding WebPages when they first came into the mainstream. Remember circa 1996... "wow! you've got a website? cool!". The difference is simply that blogging provides an easy and incredibly well organized way to publish to your website. It's still a website though, and the hype will probably fade fairly quickly. At one time people thought everyone was destined to have a personal website. I still doubt that will happen. Anyway...

Generating this hype is the big announcement that Google has bought Blogger, one of the original blogging tools. It's quite fascinating to see everyone jump on this announcement, and hypothesize about what Google will do next. Pretty much every newspaper in the world covered the announcement as a monumental affair, even though most people still wouldn't know a blog from a fog.

Here's a synopsis of the most interesting points made recently:

Wired Mag: Why did google want Blogger? - To improve their search accuracy by analyzing what people were talking about.

The Guardian: The Genius of Blogging. - To beat the mainstream media to the juiciest online content. Great article.

Forbes: Google Goes Blog-Crazy. - Not much of a clue, but suggest Google might enter the "build your own website" arena.

Danny Sullivan: Ad distribution. - Google may plan to place ads on (presumably) free users weblog sites.

Dave G: Dosn't matter. - The important thing is that it legitimizes the medium. And the medium is huge.

Incidentally, most of the best blogs use Movablye Type these days, which sorta downgrades the quality of content that Google may be able to exclusively analyze. In the meantime, I'm inclined to agree with Dave G that the most important thing at the moment is the hype itself. Blogging takes us back to the general idea that the internet should be a great democratic place where anyone can publish thoughts on anything at negligible cost for the benefit of all. Anything that promotes that is good.