Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

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16 February 2003

As Dan Gillmor points out this step means Blogging Goes Big-Time. Google does appear to have an unerring nose for buying up companies and organizations doing cool stuff. It’s just a little worrying that one company might end up controlling large chunks of both web consumption (through search) and web creation (through blogger). Still, it’s hard to argue with something that will give self-publishing a big boost, and Google has mostly used its power responsibly. I have some concerns about their privacy policies though (see this and earlier posts of mine in the same category, and this – admittedly a little paranoid – overview).

One might ask “what bad things could realistically emerge from the Google/Blogger merger anyway?” Well, you may remember last month the Chinese authorities shut access to sites hosted by blogspot.com. I believe that has been resolved already but now Google owns Blogger and there is some evidence that Google is willing to “do business” with China’s censors. See this Wired interview

I have recently written a review of the academic literature about search engines which had some further Google-related comment.

Other comments have been made by Ben and Mena Trott (who created the software this weblog runs on), Neil Macintosh @ The Guardian, Azeem Azhar and Cory @ BoingBoing.

[Later] There’s also coverage from Slashdot and the BBC.

J Bradford DeLong in the latest Wired magazine tries to shame more people into helping existing projects to digitise books and encourage governments to do the same. Oh, and let’s not forget to start archiving more out of copyright audio and pictures too…movie download pornporn stars moviemovies pretty lesbianplayer pc for quicktime movierare vampire moviesmovies real sexron movie clips jeremyunderwear sapphic moviesshemale movie hardcoreslut movie