Google Buys Blogger

February 15, 2003 10:08 PM

Google buys Blogger. Dan Gillmor has the scoop.
posted by ntk (109 comments total)

Daypop on Crack. I like it.
posted by oissubke at 10:10 PM on February 15, 2003

Holy shiznit! There goes the neighborhood.
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:10 PM on February 15, 2003

There goes the neighborhood.

Not really. I predict good things from this. Google has proven repeatedly that they "get it". We may laugh at Blogger, but I think Google's going to find a way to squeeze some intelligence out of this. They made Usenet useful again (mostly as a searchable archive, rather than as a discussion forum), and I think they'd use Blogger for similiar purposes.

Blogging is a bit more with-it than Usenet these days, so hopefully they can find a way to apply their search technology to it and give us even more useful content to search.
posted by oissubke at 10:14 PM on February 15, 2003

oissubke has it right, expect the google/pyra labs will join forces for more good, and goodies.
posted by yonderboy at 10:16 PM on February 15, 2003

I predict good things from this. Google has proven repeatedly that they "get it".

Ummm... maybe not..
posted by slipperywhenwet at 10:17 PM on February 15, 2003

I'm kind of scared of this in a vague way.

But maybe this means by Blogger Pro version will actually be worth the money I paid for it? You know... like will it work and shit?

But is this actually true?

Holy crap. Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this.

This latest post on Ev's site makes me think... maybe he's just as surprised by this as we are.
posted by Hammerikaner at 10:20 PM on February 15, 2003

We will be googl-simlated.

(as I posted on my Blogger blog, I welcome my new Google overlords)
posted by RobbieFal at 10:22 PM on February 15, 2003

Holy crap. All I can say is "wow." I always knew Blogger would be an attractive buyout for some company, but never in a million years thought it would be google.
posted by mathowie at 10:25 PM on February 15, 2003

Here is the link hammer probably meant, on evhead
posted by rhyax at 10:26 PM on February 15, 2003

There has to be a really cool (or slightly silly) new name coming from this... Bloogle, Goggler...
posted by ArsncHeart at 10:27 PM on February 15, 2003

Thanks all for your early support(?) of the purchase. I wish we could say more now. It's going to be amazing!
posted by jasonshellen at 10:27 PM on February 15, 2003

boingboing.net is repeating the MeFi link.

how fast will this news spread across the internet?

how long until everyone who uses blogger blog this?

is this the ultimate newsmeme?
posted by Hammerikaner at 10:29 PM on February 15, 2003

jason, shouldn't you post this on the front page of blogger?

and thanks rhyax for giving the right link.
posted by Hammerikaner at 10:31 PM on February 15, 2003

Actually, I got it from Boing Boing.

Hey, if we're all going to be preserved in Google-Blog archiving aspic, we should be accurate about this stuff.
posted by ntk at 10:32 PM on February 15, 2003

I blogged this with blogger.

I can live with this move. Google has brought some traffic to KiP, such as people searching for 'PICTURES OF 1988 KURD GAS', 'al-jazeera tv freemasonry' and 'mustard gas sudam'.

With stuff like that, how can you not love Google?
posted by RobbieFal at 10:32 PM on February 15, 2003

It'll be funny when Google Sells Blogger to AOL for their new Blogging feature.
posted by Stan Chin at 10:36 PM on February 15, 2003

I was at the Live from the Blogosphere event tonight where Evan was part of the panel.

He posted the news from the panel table during the event.

I was stuck outside 'cause the room was full. I had a laptop and wifi access and could listen to the audio from inside. Near the end of the event, two guys walked up and asked if they could see something on the net. The asked for evhead.com and pointed to the link on the page. That's when I saw the news. The guys were from audblog.com and had come from San Fran just for the event. They said they saw him blogging when they were inside adn wanted to see what it said.
posted by Argyle at 10:36 PM on February 15, 2003

news at the speed of blog
posted by yonderboy at 10:45 PM on February 15, 2003

oissubke, I was being sarcastic. I think it's probably good for both parties, if Google can take steps to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

The obvious complaint will be that bloggers using Blogger will be ranked higher than competing services using some brute-force method; slightly more subtle is the idea that either the way Blogger pages are put together, or the Google algorithm itself, will be tweaked to ensure a similar result.

I don't for a femtosecond think Google is dumb enough to tinker with the hard-earned reputation for accuracy and credibility that has taken them to the top of the SE market, but that won't keep folk from whining.
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:47 PM on February 15, 2003

i see your blog and raise you a google
posted by poopy at 10:47 PM on February 15, 2003

Amen to the shock. And congrats, pyra folk. I wonder if they'll be employees of Google now or if they'll step aside completely?
posted by Ufez Jones at 10:48 PM on February 15, 2003

I used Blogger for a while before switching to a self-hosted solution. It's a good program. A little buggy, and reliability never was too great (and you can't blame them for that, dot-com burn out and everything).

But I do have to ask, isn't this something Google could have built themselves instead of buying Blogger? 1000 engineers with 1000 keyboards... er... well, you know what I mean.

I think this might be really cool, especially if the interface gets "Google-ized" and becomes really simple and easy to use, and availability becomes something great.

This will also make Yahoo! run faster towards buying Inktomi, because Google will be stomping in on their GeoCities turf now. Google can make a tool easy to use.

I've always wondered how Google would do if they offered webmail. (I know, off topic... it's 1:49 in the morning, so I'm rambling a bit.)
posted by benjh at 10:49 PM on February 15, 2003

I notice that Dan Bricklin was at Dave Winer's meeting a few days ago, I wonder if he knew then what we all know now. :)
posted by yonderboy at 10:51 PM on February 15, 2003

There has to be a really cool (or slightly silly) new name coming from this... Bloogle, Goggler...

Bloogle?
From our very own iceberg273.
posted by Octaviuz at 10:52 PM on February 15, 2003

Google makes one more step in it's goal to dominate the Internet. Wow.


Congrats to the Pyra labs people.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:54 PM on February 15, 2003

Potentially relevant heated discussion of Google's somewhat less-than-forthright approach to answering questions about its cookies.
posted by mediareport at 10:55 PM on February 15, 2003

jason shellen confirms the story on his blog.
posted by Hammerikaner at 11:00 PM on February 15, 2003

Congrats to the Pyra labs people.

It should be noted that, other than ev, no one from the original pyra crew who put the time and sweat into building blogger are still around.

Kinda sad.
posted by Dennis Murphy at 11:19 PM on February 15, 2003

This is huge news for the [duck] blogosphere [/duck]. A new tab in the Blogger interface, right after "News"? Yowsa!

Congratulations (of varying degree of heartiness depending on what happens now, I guess) to Ev and co.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:27 PM on February 15, 2003

Booger™
posted by bwg at 11:36 PM on February 15, 2003

C'mon, someone woulda said it sooner or later...
posted by bwg at 11:37 PM on February 15, 2003

But I do have to ask, isn't this something Google could have built themselves instead of buying Blogger?

Probably, but the brand is worth a lot.

I just hope that using my own homespun opensource totally cool CMS lists me in google/news or google/blogs even though I'm not using Blogger.
posted by jragon at 11:41 PM on February 15, 2003

I'm happy for them, and not sore about old crap. I'm sure the rising tide will raise all our boats.
posted by mathowie at 11:50 PM on February 15, 2003

Heh heh.. I completed the switch to Moveable Type just this afternoon. But I wish Blogger well, as there wasn't anything wrong with the service that Google couldn't fix.
posted by Hildago at 12:14 AM on February 16, 2003

Is it rude to ask how much he got for it?
posted by sadie01221975 at 12:34 AM on February 16, 2003

What has occurred to me is that Google has been indexing the web, almost in it's entirety, for quite some time now. That is, until the bloggers started showing up in more frequency and updating extremely regularly.

Now, not only can they directly access blog data and include it in the index but, they will also get access to the statistics, as well. Thus, freeing up the crawlers to do work elsewhere. I saw this coming since the release of the API, I just never expected it to be Pyra..

If any negative effect occurs to the blogging community, it could be that their relevance in search results may decrease as a result of this. In other words, now when you type a "new hot" keyphrase, fewer blogs may show up. Which, to date, has been quite an eye-opener to the big brother media types.

Just my humble opinion, more news will surely follow making this all irrelevant, I'm sure.
posted by Dean_Paxton at 12:37 AM on February 16, 2003

This could get very interesting.
posted by brittney at 12:53 AM on February 16, 2003

This will create some great synergy for bloggers as well as search engine users alike:

Blog any searchresult live to your blog, and get some easy way of blogging all news.

As well as do a targeted search for 'personal views' of all news stories, probably a new option with the 'and 123 other sites' link on google news.

Blogging becomes big! Hooray. Now if we can only get rid of the term blogging all would be perfect.
posted by sebas at 1:21 AM on February 16, 2003

Slashdot has noticed:

''Great :( So as if my searches weren't already becoming diluted with Blog drivel they definitely will now!'
posted by LMG at 1:26 AM on February 16, 2003

I am betting that Google wants access to the backend of the Blogger database. You could run some nifty statistics on it and determine the hardest links to spot: new and interesting memes coming up --basically use Blogger as the early sniffer for things like Google News or Google Hip or whatever.

It's an interesting idea, 'coz I've had it over a year ago... that's what I've been building up memigo to become. Don't think I can compete with Google+Blogger though :-(...
posted by costas at 1:30 AM on February 16, 2003

BTW, I mean "compete" in the mind-share sense. You need large numbers of users to have meaningful statistics, and Blogger was and is the leader in that sense, which is why I am guessing Google bought them, instead of some other centralized blogging architecture (Moveable Type wouldn't qualify for instance, as it is decentralized).
posted by costas at 1:40 AM on February 16, 2003

I hate to be a bitch here, but isn't this really BlogRoots' territory?
posted by wackybrit at 2:54 AM on February 16, 2003

isn't this really BlogRoots' territory?

Wasn't blogroots territory originally metafilter territory? Many people may not read both sites.
posted by walrus at 3:09 AM on February 16, 2003

A new tab in the Blogger interface, right after "News"?

...I meant, er, Google interface...oh, never mind.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:25 AM on February 16, 2003

We still get free blogs, right?
posted by konolia at 3:47 AM on February 16, 2003

1) Isn't it a little scary when Google will automagically read everything we post, immediately, and allow that to be searched? What do we do if we want privacy? Based on Google's previous record, it looks like it may be next to impossible to opt out. Perhaps opting-in is the better option.

2) Could Google move offshore to prevent possible governmental intrusions into what may be the largest database of internet activity? Perhaps they are the forerunners to an "internet state" that has it's own legal/administrative/justice system that is treated equally in the nation-state arena. (With it's own copyright and fair use paradigms to boot!)
posted by danbeckmann at 3:55 AM on February 16, 2003

Dan, that's what I and some other folks have been discussing for some years now; we're sort of a Sealand Fan Club.

There are worse flavors for such a thing to be than Googland, by far.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:03 AM on February 16, 2003

RIP Nick Denton's blog indexing company, for Booger™
shall rule the blog world for generations to come.
posted by BubbaDude at 4:05 AM on February 16, 2003

1) Isn't it a little scary They're doing that already, with any web sites. What do we do if we want privacy? Don't have a web site. Why would you post something on the web if you're worried about who's going to read it? Ascribing black helicopters to Google is just loopy.
posted by mcwetboy at 4:06 AM on February 16, 2003

What do we do if we want privacy?

just stick meta tags into your blog that protect your site from being idexed. eg: meta name="robots" content="no index,follow" if you don't mind being indexed but are uncomfy with the idea of your blog entries being archived for all eternity, use meta tags that keep your site from being archived. eg: meta name="robots" content="nocache,noarchive"
posted by t r a c y at 4:43 AM on February 16, 2003

As a former user of Blogger, I can only say congrats to Ev and company. I loved the product and the fact that it was so versatile. With Google running the show now, it can only get more versatile.

Water under the bridge and all that, but I do wonder if Ev will throw a few dollars to former employees? I seem to recall that he said he always intended to do such a thing if it was possible.

Matt, you mentioned recently that you might be willing to get rid of metafilter; does the sale of Blogger make you think a little more seriously of putting it on the marker? After years of hard work, you must find it intriguing that you could make a decent pile of cash from it, this despite the fact that you never created metafilter for the dollars.

dan and adam, those are very interesting thoughts you have about an "internet state". Verrrrrrry interesting.
posted by ashbury at 4:48 AM on February 16, 2003

This excites me, a lot. More than it should, probably, but heck, we all need a little joy in our lives.

Google Groups has been incredibly useful to me (hell, I even picked up a boyfriend with them), and even though it archives every little twitch I make on usenet, I've yet to notice it be anything worse than minorly annoying, and more often to be very helpful.

Google and blogger are my two very favorite web entities (errrr, next to mefi, of course), seeing them together is like watching a very good episode of TLC's "Wedding Story".

I always get so choked up at these things..*sniff*
posted by jheiz at 5:39 AM on February 16, 2003

I can't wait to see the little blogger tag on the google toolbar. Just wondering how much blogger was worth ...
posted by feelinglistless at 5:49 AM on February 16, 2003

ashbury, email me if you wanna hear the spiel. ; . )
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:50 AM on February 16, 2003

RIP Nick Denton's blog indexing company

As the co-founder of "Nick Denton's blog indexing company" (and the co-founder of Pyra Labs) I can tell you this isn't RIP for what we're doing and building. You can read more about the Lafayette Project here but we're not building weblog search, and never had any intention of going up against Google, even before this deal was announced.
posted by megnut at 6:12 AM on February 16, 2003

Damn, I'd have had pithy and slightly caustic blogtastical commentary aplenty to share if I hadn't have chosen this evening to swill oceanic quantities of beer. Uh, again. You know, just for a change of pace.

As it is, I'm too busy dancing naked.

(Email me too, adamgreenfield, you derriereduvet!)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:23 AM on February 16, 2003

Blogger: Ultra-hip, way-cool...the bugs and the periodic downtime never bothered me.

Google: Can't imagine a world without it.

Two great tastes, that taste great together!
posted by davidmsc at 7:07 AM on February 16, 2003

Now it seems 100% sure that David Winer will beat Martin Nisenholtz on their Wired bet (May'02): "Weblogs will outrank the New York Times Web site by 2007 (based on a Google search of five keywords or phrases reflecting the top five news stories)". And we don't have to wait until 2007.
posted by nandop at 7:36 AM on February 16, 2003

stavrosthewonderchicken: As it is, I'm too busy dancing naked.

You've been plucked?
posted by jonmc at 8:03 AM on February 16, 2003

JonMC, you hadn't heard? Stavros is struttin' in his "bare necessities!"


posted by davidmsc at 8:20 AM on February 16, 2003

next person who says 'blogosphere" is gonna meet the wrong end of my elephant.
posted by quonsar at 8:25 AM on February 16, 2003

Naked, and packin'.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:31 AM on February 16, 2003

holy crap! radio controlled robot snakes?!?

really: it's like my two best friends are getting married. little [b] and the big [G]. (single tear. sniff.) if invited, i'm sure to make an ass of myself at the reception. congratulations!
posted by steef at 8:49 AM on February 16, 2003

I think this was inevitable, what with all the "o"s and "g"s in all the right places. *grin* Congrats Ev & Co.! I like "Goggler" myself - LOL - sorta applicably descriptive in its own way.
posted by thunder at 8:54 AM on February 16, 2003

blogosphere
posted by mokey at 9:18 AM on February 16, 2003

I can't wait to see what happens, this still seems like an odd fit to me. Google is a very smart company, and does two things with every move it makes. It either makes money or gets much better upon each acquisition or major feature (news, ads, usenet). They've yet to fail on anything, so what approach will they take with pyra?

They can go for money, and get rid of free blogs, charging a few bucks each month, but I don't think they'll take that approach. It's short-sighted and ignores the data.

So how do they make google better? What can they do with weblog data to make google search better? I don't buy the "google indexes blog data instantly!" angle, if I'm searching for the capitol of Estonia, does it matter if the blog results that pepper the search are up-to-date if they're not my answer?

Is it just a ploy to add a human editor element to google news, which is lacking in timeliness and goes a little off-topic at times? But why buy pyra when they could just aim a million bots at blogs instead?

Let's look at the basics. Google's meat and potatoes is text and links. Weblogs certainly have many of both. Perhaps blog posts will somehow become part of the pagerank system, as bloggers act as an ad-hoc of human editors, scouring the web for the interesting angles, and giving nods to google along the way. With more bloggers, more of the web will be seen by them, maybe even beating out google bots in the process and allowing google to discover more content (and quicker) then it could find on its own. Perhaps pyra is adding a million pairs of eyeballs to google, with the chance for a million more to help steer the googlebot where it should be looking for content, the instant it happens.

I could see google's search results getting incredibly timely if links bloggers point to are used to determine results (instead of the content of posts itself). So, say a couple weeks ago, at 9:15AM EST you searched for "space shuttle" at google. Not only would you get standard nasa pages up near the top, but you'd also get the breaking story link. Perhaps the very first report at CNN or the florida newspaper sites would peak instantly, based on the (internal to google) datapoint that 50 bloggers pointed to it in the last ten minutes.

This could be quite interesting, and be a sort of uber-daypop fueling googlebots and google search, based on the links within blog content instead of just blog content itself.

Maybe that's what google is really buying, and starting with pyra's userbase was the fastest way to achieve their goal of super fast, super accurate search.arch results.
posted by mathowie at 9:44 AM on February 16, 2003

As I was listening to LIVE FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE last nite (very rough transcript), I thought Ev's demonstration of audblogs was going to be the Big Thing Everyone Will Talk About. But then he dropped this bomb. I think it was Tony Pierce that kept saying "Holy shit. Holy shit!"

I'm still wondering though - other than making it more accessible, how is this really going to change blogging? Will Google offer some new tools or change the way they search blog content?
posted by Dok Millennium at 10:04 AM on February 16, 2003

D'oh! Matt was fast on the scent before I finished my post. Right -- maybe you'll see a "blog popularity index" listed in standard search results, and you can jump to the uber-daypop results instead of the standard results. You might really want the NASA space shuttle link and not the blogpopular links, but Google should present both options to you.
posted by Dok Millennium at 10:13 AM on February 16, 2003

Google makes a good deal of money off text ads. Blogs are probably going to get an increasing share of eyeballs. I would guess they're just looking for another place to run their ads.

They may also be thinking in terms of knowledge management in companies the same way they've released their search boxes, but that seems like a long-shot, gambling on the future kind of possibility.
posted by willnot at 10:13 AM on February 16, 2003

Hmm. I hope there's an easy way to set up and administer those audblogs. Seems like a lot of bandwidth and storage to worry about.

If blogging is an awful term, surely audblog is worse.
posted by mblandi at 10:19 AM on February 16, 2003

anildash puts in his two cents, also with some skepticism along the same lines as mathowie; but one of his commenters is on target with this assessment: Pyra has/is about to have a version of Blogger written more or less completely in Java that can be deployed on any server. The Globo deal was just the tip of the iceberg, they (Ev and Jason) wanted to sell this into corporations for a few $k per server. Combine that with Google search appliance and maybe another odd piece or two and you have a very sophisticated, valuable Intranet addition. The Klogger Appliance? That may not be precisely true, but it's got to be very much the direction that Google is looking at -- certainly, from the least, selling to paying customers.

Also, clearly Google could have written this themselves, but Blogger has mindshare, and they can automatically pick up its 1,000,000 active users as customers.

quonsar: I would agree that "blogosphere" is a pretentious label -- for everlasting blort. But not all bloggers have as high aspirations as you for keeping track of stupid weird and funny stuff. Maybe you could stop carping about a term that was never intended to include you.
posted by dhartung at 10:46 AM on February 16, 2003

Definitely big news.

Blogger is such a great tool for people like me whose web-design savvy is on shaky ground. I paid for Blogger Pro as a thank-you for the free service, though there hasn't been a whole lot of functionality. Perhaps there will be new fun toys to play with.
posted by Kafkaesque at 11:36 AM on February 16, 2003

Blogger has five employees, which isn't that much more than they would have used anyway and this way they get a brand new--allegedly the new Blogger software, written in Java and targeted for Linux installs--reasonably state of the art implementation.

Plus, and I have difficulty believing no one has mentioned this yet: what about combining the installable version of Blogger with the Google Search Appliance as the latest killer Intranet app? Sell 3-5,000 licenses and you've more than paid for the acqusition.
posted by billsaysthis at 12:09 PM on February 16, 2003

Anybody want to speculate on who will spend how much to buy Movable Type from Ben and Mena Trott?

Yesterday they were just two crazy kids with an idea, tomorrow they'll be a takeover target.
posted by briank at 12:20 PM on February 16, 2003

Anybody want to speculate on who will spend how much to buy Movable Type from Ben and Mena Trott?

Please don't.
posted by mgtrott at 12:27 PM on February 16, 2003 [1 favorite]

Why not, it seems like a valid question. You are the hot property and all the Big Media boys are drooling over themselves about blogs -- gotta have one before they get skunked by someone else. You're a natural target.

The only player we haven't heard from is that large operation in Redmond.......
posted by briank at 12:45 PM on February 16, 2003

Some reasons to think this could be not bad:

- Persistence of blogged content - e.g., now if a blogware company goes belly up, what happens?

- Ease of searching blogs - exactly where is that brilliant bit you wrote some eons back about Fainting Goats?

- Ease of directory assistance for bloggers. E.g., say you want to find bloggers who know all about Matisse's childhood, or Indonesian cuisine, or Ponca City, OK - how, at present, do you find them?

(More here)
posted by urbanrubbish at 12:51 PM on February 16, 2003

quonsar: I would agree that "blogosphere" is a pretentious label -- for everlasting blort. But not all bloggers have as high aspirations as you for keeping track of stupid weird and funny stuff. Maybe you could stop carping about a term that was never intended to include you.

Uh-oh! There's a committee somewhere that decides which blogs are in and which blogs are out? And I'm floating around out in meaningless void of vapid space with quonsar? Why didn't I get the memo!!
posted by madamjujujive at 1:07 PM on February 16, 2003

Shameless link to my audio/video blog.
posted by owillis at 1:18 PM on February 16, 2003

no, allow me, my dear madamjujujive:

<div class="fuck the fuck off, fucko">
quonsar: I would agree that "blogosphere" is a pretentious label -- for everlasting blort. But not all bloggers have as high aspirations as you for keeping track of stupid weird and funny stuff. Maybe you could stop carping about a term that was never intended to include you.
</div>

don't forget to pick up some BodyGlide™ on the way home, dear.
posted by quonsar at 1:41 PM on February 16, 2003

btw, there is an updated version of the original article, with a few more details.
posted by mathowie at 2:13 PM on February 16, 2003

what about combining the installable version of Blogger with the Google Search Appliance as the latest killer Intranet app? Sell 3-5,000 licenses and you've more than paid for the acqusition.

But why would Google need to buy all of Pyra just to do that? It sounds like a good idea, but it would make more sense for Google just to build a new weblog tool for it, wouldn't it?
posted by mattpfeff at 2:14 PM on February 16, 2003

Blogosphere is pretentious. For any weblog. It's also a horrible, ugly word and I can't believe it is the one the community has apparently settled on. I'd have thought it would have been put out of the running for aesthetic reasons alone. But anyway, to get back on topic, I only see good things coming of this. The power of google behind an idea like blogger has the potential to do great things for the web.
posted by Nothing at 2:17 PM on February 16, 2003

maybe it'll be like a competitor to yahoo!'s most-(emailed, viewed, voted the greatest) but for blogs? i dunno :)
posted by kliuless at 2:28 PM on February 16, 2003

I've always preferred "Blogistan".
posted by BubbaDude at 2:53 PM on February 16, 2003

I've always loved the word 'Bloginalia'
posted by feelinglistless at 3:36 PM on February 16, 2003

Now if we can only get rid of the term blogging all would be perfect.
If you could include any word that contained the string "blog" and referred to a web site or sites, I would be very happy. I suspect there is a reason that the MeFi spell-check suggests "bog" as a replacement (cultural explanation - bog=toilet).
posted by dg at 3:55 PM on February 16, 2003

Is this in any way related to China blocking blogspot recently?
posted by adampsyche at 3:56 PM on February 16, 2003

Michael Barone, when he was incorrectly crediting blogs with bringing down Trent Lott on the McLaughlin show, referred to it as "the Bloggerdom". That doesn't do it for me.
posted by BubbaDude at 4:37 PM on February 16, 2003

Maybe you could stop carping about a term that was never intended to include you.

Indeed, we should all once again acknowledge Bill Quick's extreme cleverness in coining a term to encompass the entire psychotic, racist fringe for which Dan is our resident apologist.
posted by jjg at 5:00 PM on February 16, 2003

...psychotic, racist fringe?

Quick favors the liberation of Iraq, a position directly contrary to the racist stance holding that swarthy people can't handle democracy and therefore should be left in the hands of genocidal ethnic cleansers like Saddam Hussein.

I don't know what you're trying to say here, jjg, but maybe you don't either.
posted by BubbaDude at 6:54 PM on February 16, 2003

I could not have asked for a better exemplar. Thanks for stopping by!
posted by jjg at 7:18 PM on February 16, 2003

It's also a horrible, ugly word and I can't believe it is the one the community has apparently settled on.


I've said this before, but no it's not. 'Blogosphere' is an elegant and amusing neologism, playing as it does on logos (a word or form that expresses a thought. In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos. Among the Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments themselves. In Stoicism, the active, material, rational principle of the cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is the source of all activity and generation and is the power of reason residing in the human soul (from here)) and the concept of the logosphere.

I love this word, and all joking aside, am chagrined when people rail against it. It may be pretentious, sure, but it's rich with with possible meaning, and that's good, in my books.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:40 PM on February 16, 2003

"Blogosphere" sounds like a Pauly Shore movie. I see him typing furiously in a little bubble.
posted by sadie01221975 at 8:26 PM on February 16, 2003

That's great news. But could you guys please get the Blogger Pro publishing database back up? I can't believe how often that thing crashes.
posted by inksyndicate at 8:29 PM on February 16, 2003

I've read a few defenses of the word, and I agree that it is rich with possible meaning. And that is good, of course, you are right. I have no argument with it there. I just don't like the sound of it. It grates on me. A silly reason to dislike a word, perhaps, but there you go. Much of my dislike stems from the root--blog--which is one of the more ungraceful words ever conceived. Many of those "sins of the father" are avoided if you pronounce blogosphere as if it were indeed based on logos, but no one seems to do that.
posted by Nothing at 8:52 PM on February 16, 2003

I've never been fond of the word "blog," come to think of it. Sounds like a euphemism (so to speak) for vomiting.

Crap. Now someone is going to say that vomiting IS blogging, or vice-versa.
posted by davidmsc at 9:05 PM on February 16, 2003

elephantosphere is rich with possible meaning.
blogosphere is just a stupid concatenation that only continues to live because it makes certain self-glorifying individuals feel they are part of some important movement. in truth, far more important movements occur in the depths of the bowels.
posted by quonsar at 9:29 PM on February 16, 2003

We're all just constellations in the Everlasting Blortosphere, after all!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:06 PM on February 16, 2003

Evhead: "So yes, I sold the company ..."
posted by sylloge at 1:04 AM on February 17, 2003

jjg, we're actually thanking Brad Graham for coining the term 'blogosphere' and simultaneously pointing out that the word is complete drivel.

It may have been picked up and misused by someone later, but the word means nothing. Blogs and bloggers do not form a collective entity that behaves with a singular force that can be quantified or described. If something changes as a result of a group of journalist/bloggers it is because of their association, not a larger entity, especially one that doesn't actually exist.

Better explained in this previous thread.
posted by yonderboy at 2:53 AM on February 17, 2003

Blogopoly over the blogopolis? Blogalization? Blogemony?
posted by hairyeyeball at 3:14 AM on February 17, 2003

If blogging is a new word for vomiting you could put it in context like this:

'I went out for a few drinks last night but got so drunk that I blogged up all over the pavement last night. Someone walked by and the sight of me blogging made him blog as well. The combined blogging created a blogosphere that eventually ran into the gutter. Close examination showed I had blogged up some of the pasta I ate earlier. A spectator commented that we were now blogbrothers'
posted by sebas at 3:19 AM on February 17, 2003

Google bought the online Usenet archive Deja.com a few years ago. If it had been Yahoo! instead, Deja might simply have been re-branded and the service left pretty much as it was. But Google used Deja only as the foundation for the service they eventually wanted to create. Google never used the Deja search software, and the six years of Usenet posts was beefed up to twenty, creating a much more useful and comprehensive archive.

I would expect something similar from Google. Right now the search engine provides a number of specialized searches along with their general Web service, and a think a blog search to be the most likely new feature. It may well be that Google is as interested in the Blogger API as anything else. What I imagine as the end result of this is a cross between Weblogs.com, Daypop, and the current Google News... but we'll see soon enough.
posted by tranquileye at 5:25 AM on February 17, 2003

Blogs and bloggers do not form a collective entity that behaves with a singular force that can be quantified or described.

how bout a bose-einstein condosphere :) may decohere when googled!
posted by kliuless at 5:40 AM on February 17, 2003

sebas - awesome, just awesome.
posted by jonah at 7:57 AM on February 17, 2003

Just to speculate. I mean this is a great thing. But what about the Hitler won WWII version? How could this go terribly wrong?
posted by feelinglistless at 2:20 PM on February 17, 2003

Like all commonly used words, I imagine that the term "blogosphere," if it continues to maintain frequent usage, will settle into the maelstrom of human language without much contention. I'm sure there were people who were horrified that speakers lazily abbreviated "facsimile" to "fax." I'm confident that the language will take care of itself.
posted by vraxoin at 7:40 AM on February 18, 2003

blogeratti? blogaria? ....Holy Shit, look at all those Trackbacks!!
posted by dgaicun at 12:49 PM on February 18, 2003