Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[schampeo at hesketh.com (Steven Champeon)]

on Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 08:51:30PM -0500, Scott Lundgren wrote:
> 
> >Dan Gillmor says Google just bought Pyra Labs.
> 
> Mmmm, ponder Blogger + Google's Zeitgeist. With some stories like Lott's
> comment about Thurmond kept alive by blogging and web journalism when
> ignored by corporate owned networks, I wonder if such an acquisition will:
> 
> a) accelerate decentralized one person web journalism

Everyone keeps saying this, but as far as I understand it, Blogger isn't
decentralized anything - it's all stored at Pyra, and then you can either
have them host it for you (Blog*spot) or ftp/scp it to your server. It's
all there, though, in one place. What's "decentralized" about that? That's
about as centralized as you can get.

> b) be really cool to literally see an idea propagate across people's
> conscience
> c) make googling about your date/job candidate/sales prospect more
> easy/scary

Why? Google couldn't do this already, just by spidering the existing
sites? I still don't get it. 

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>From s_l at mindspring.com  Tue Feb 18 10:38:51 2003
From: s_l at mindspring.com (Scott Lundgren)
Date: Tue Feb 18 10:37:58 2003
Subject: [internetworkers] google buys pyra
In-Reply-To: <20030218100531.C19805 AT hesketh.com>
Message-ID: <NGBBKCCAELELMGGNOHJPOEDMCJAA.s_l AT mindspring.com>

>all there, though, in one place. What's "decentralized" about that?
>That's about as centralized as you can get.

I was thinking about the reporting/journalism aspect (lots of people of
multiple viewpoints/experience vs. a news service) instead of the technical
architecture.

>Why? Google couldn't do this already, just by spidering the existing sites?

True they could spider the existing sites. But considering what small
percentage of the web is indexed, I would think it would prohibitively slow
to spider across the internet noting when a blog is found. However if you
have a dedicated chunk of information you know are all blogs, then it
becomes easier to index and see information patterns. What I would be
interested in seeing is a zeitgeist of blogs, like you can see a zeitgeist
of google's search terms.

- SL