Google just bought Pyra (Blogger company)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml#0008
02

    February 15, 2003
Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time
€ posted by Dan Gillmor 07:41 PM


NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a special column running in
tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News. We're posting it early to get the story
out.

Weblogs are going Googling.

Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a
San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for
writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online
publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and
information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse
chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they
include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from
technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs
invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to
other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

"I couldn't be more excited about this," said Evan Williams, founder of
Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn't discuss
terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke
Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the "resources to build on the vision
I've been working on for years."

Part of that vision, shared by other blogging pioneers, has been to help
democratize the creation and flow of news in a world where giant companies
control so much of what most people see, hear and read. Weblogs are also
becoming a valuable communication tool for groups of people, and have begun
to infiltrate the corporate, university and government spheres.

Just three and a half years old, Pyra's Blogger software has 1.1 million
registered users, Williams said. He estimated that about 200,000 of them are
actively running weblogs. Pyra charges for some higher-capability services
not available in the base configuration, but most of its registered users
don't pay.

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't
the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two
years ago Google bought Deja.com, a company that had collected and continued
to update Usenet "newsgroups," Internet discussion forums. More recently, it
created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than
4,000 news sites on the Net.

But now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the
company's director of corporate communications, called "a global
self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic,
diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."

"We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between
our two companies," he said in a statement on Saturday. He didn't elaborate
further on what those synergies and opportunities might be, but said more
details would emerge soon. Users of the Blogger software and hosting service
won't see any immediate changes, he added.

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate
impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the
vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service
more reliable and robust.

How Google manages the Blogger software and Pyra's hosting service may
present some tricky issues. The search side of Google indexes weblogs from
all of the major blogging platforms, including Movable Type and Userland
Radio. Any hint of proprietary favoritism would meet harsh criticism.

Blogging was moving mainstream even before this buyout. Several weblogs draw
a large readership, and bloggers demonstrated their collective power to keep
an issue alive even when the traditional media miss the story, as former
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his dismay late last
year.

Major technology companies are seeing the potential. Tripod, the consumer
web-publishing unit of Terra Lycos, recently introduced a "Blog Builder"
tool. America Online is expected to do something similar, and no one will be
surprised if Yahoo and Microsoft do the same. Are more buyouts of blog
toolmakers in the offing?

Developers of blogging software have been finding user-friendly ways to help
readers of weblogs and other information find and collect material from a
variety of sites. It's in this arena that the Google-Pyra deal may have the
most implications.

More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of
the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what
we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear.

UPDATE:

*    Nick Denton asks: "Will Google use weblog links to improve Google
News?" I asked Google's spokesman roughly the same question, but got no
answer. Stay tuned, he said, because the company is just starting to figure
out how it's going to use this stuff.

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