so, it turns out that
google’s
founders originally aspired to build a
web site annotation system
:
“”It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web–build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.”
obviously this is interesting in light of their purchase of
blogger, but take it a step further and throw in geographic information. imagine, if you will, that
blogger
suddenly supports a
geourl
-like mechanism for embedding geographic data in a blog or even individual posts, similar in style to the
movabletype geourl plugin. imagine if
google takes advantage of that information to give you pageranked posts and advertising about locations. they already give you a map when you search for an address. it’s the next logical step in geo-location services and pagerank minimizes the
signal-to-noise issues
that will happen when everyone and their brother is annotation their neighborhood.
maybe i won’t need to work on the
geourl
filter.
this thought experiment highlights an important role that blogger will play in future – rightly or wrongly it will be in a position to set de facto standards that google can take advantage of.