How should existing blog portals react to Google's move?
- Lead By Innovation: what does Google's blog search look like? It looks like Google's regular search. Blog content is, structurally, very different in many ways from your average web page - or rather, blogs are more coherent as a class of structured documents. In addition, the relationships between the document elements, the intentions of the search/user group and the strong community aspect of the content creation component necessitate new paradigms of interaction and access. This is exactly why blog search tools have lead to some incredible innovations that make the simple Google experience almost look out of place in the blogosphere. Google has tried to interface to the blogosphere on its terms - the first movers have all been about making interfaces to the blogosphere that include search, but so much more.
- Forget Blogs: blogs are an instance of a whole class of data - Online Personal Media (to create a new term for what is sometimes referred to as User or Consumer Generated Media - more later on why I prefer this new terminology). The play for those in this space (which includes blogs, message boards, flickr, social tagging - all that good stuff) is to translate the hype around blogs into access into a vast space of content which simply cannot be adequately serviced by a simple search interface.
I'm excited by Google at last moving into the space, but on reflection, my expectation is to see Google reacting to the realities of the space rather than to see the likes of Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub and so on panic and turn into Google clones over blog data.
Some other considerations:
- Google will bring more traffic to blogs (I've seen a sliver of this already in my log).
- Blogger will become less of a hot-bed for spam (one can dream!).
- The pressure is on for full content - leading to acceleration in the feed advertisement space.
- Google brings more awareness to the space - have a look at Alexa's view of the last day: more traffic to Technorati and BlogPulse:
(BTW, if you are wondering why I prefer Online Personal Media to Consumer Generated Media, I realised I can't think of people stuck in a war or disaster zone uploading images to Flickr and blogging via their cellphones as being consumers! 'Consumer' is a role for an individual - it is the individual that blogs, sometimes as a consumer, but often not. The next step in terminology is to figure out something that captures this and which can capture feeds - 'Feed Media'?)
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