A proposal for Bloogle
Google's acquisition of Blogger is exciting: Google can improve Blogger, and Blogger can improve Google. That's more than can be said for most mergers. Google also gets the benefit of the doubt; it hasn't put a foot wrong yet, apart from the occasional surrender to censorship. Jeff Jarvis and others make the point that Google's pristine reputation is a safeguard: it will suffer if an overmighty Google stifles innovation. After all, remember Sergey Brin's ethical policy: don't be evil.
There's an easy way for Google to show that it won't abuse its new power in weblog content: support an open standard for weblog updates and indexing. What does that mean? · 1. Treat all weblog publishing systems equally. Google should undertake to refresh the index for a Movable Type blog, for instance, as rapidly as it does for a site produced by Blogger. Google could do this easily enough by tracking pings to weblogs.com, and sending out a crawler in response to the signal that a particular weblog had updated. Let Blogger compete on its own merits as a publishing system, not on an unfair advantage in access to Google's index. · 2. Gloogle should itself ping a central directory such as weblogs.com with a details of all new posts within Blogger. Few Blogger sites have RSS feeds, or announce their updates. Google will control all this information, centrally. By sharing it with the community, Google can ensure that tools such as NetNewsWire continue to innovate.
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