i'm probably being a dolt, but i don't understand the analysis that google bought pyra/blogger to improve it's search results:

" Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.

The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web. :

the article cites a credible source, but i'm still not getting it. i don't understand what google gets with cozier access to blogger's database that it couldn't get by indexing pages by themselves. most reports indicate that there are "only" 200,000 frequently updated blogger blogs and presumably only a smallish percentage of those are linking to things that could help google improve its search results. these are all numbers that google should handle without breaking a sweat.

sure it might get a better feel for when exactly a blog gets updated by having access to the database, but it seems like there are ways around this using a variety of algorithms.

if you're keeping track, i ran 11 miles today. hooohaaaaaah!

d'oh! bekkers doesn't work at groove , but he does own a guitar so maybe bekkers, burkhardt and pope will be playing in your town soon.

maybe they'd let me open for them. time to replace the crusty strings on my 1975 martin d35 . it's hard to believe she's almost 30 years old. all these years and she's still got the best tone i've ever heard. not that i'm biased or anything.

nearly everyday i look towards the groove constellation of links in my "blogroll" and laugh a little laugh to myself when i see bekkers , burkhardt and pope . rather than work at groove , i think they need to form a prog rock band named "bekkers, burkhardt and pope" and start touring with king crimson.

while certainly an unscientific poll, rebecca asks a .mil reader for a view of the situation with Iraq from where he sits - and gets a surprise:

"...I'll say that those that I know of and work with in the base operations and training communities view Iraq as an enormous waste of time, money and resources. We're all praying that it gets put off past the summer, so that the funds for our projects aren't sucked back into the black hole that is Desert Storm II or whatever they're calling it. The political leadership is not held in esteem. No one is planning on them being around past 20 January 2005."

the video footage of the nightclub fire is absolutely horrifying. it's obvious that there will be louder calls for night club regulation, but will it really do any good?

every wondered about the difference between a user agent and a robot? or whether the "Offline Web Pages" feature of Internet Explorer makes it more like a robot or a user agent? i thought you did. watch the debate ensue as the "newsmonster cometh".

Opportunities for Covad, Earthlink in FCC Decision:

"The knowledge you're to die in the morning is a great motivator."

despite the fact that i don't actually live in chicago, i infiltrated the chicago blogger meetup with matt [ hmmm. hint ] and had the opportunity to meet leigh , andrew and paul , while unsuspectingly drinking the world's most expensive beer on the planet courtesy of dave and buster . it's always good to engage in some old school conversatin', made all the more fun when people smile and tolerate my obtuse segues.

well, alrighty then. i'm obscure, but interesting. story of my life.

for whatever reason, coffee has been not treating me kindly lately, so i've been drinking more tea. i'm an unwashed heathen when it comes to teas, which is why i'm happy to see caterina's tea recommendations.

not that i'm trying to turn this into all-bloggle-all-the-time, but it's interesting to note that search engine watch is also talking about the bloggle geolocation services that i was stammering on about yesterday - i forgot about the winner of the programming contest:

"A recent trend with weblogs has been geolocation: publishing the coordinates of the blog author. Last year's Google Programming Contest winner created a geographic search program that enables users to search for web pages within a specified geographic area."

i'm sure he's busy and everything, but isn't it ironic that ev has gone offline?

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 foaf 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.

wierd. i happened upon jd lasica's article on rss feeds, "news that comes to you" and discovered that the vast wasteland is "obscure":

"Ehud Lamm, a professor at the Open University of Israel, subscribes to 120 feeds and checks his news aggregator three to five times a day. He cherry-picks from a variety of feeds: foreign news (International Herald Tribune, BBC), bloggers (InstaPundit, Scripting News), obscure sites like Snowdeal.org, and sites that plumb niche subjects like linguistics and sociology."

i guess i've been called worse. interestingly, even though i thought i've been blogging for all these years, i guess i'm not really a blogger. hi. ho.

after wading through scads of cruft in the comments on anil's thoughts on the google/pyra thing, bill lazar hits the nail solidly and squarely on the head, at least for the corporate side of things:

"The one thing all the commentary so far is focused on are the effect on personal blogs and Google's current provision of all 'personal' services at no charge.

But what no one has mmentioned, and may really be the key, is that 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."

on the general consumer side, my bet is that news.blogger.com is going to stop 404ing real soon now - the resurrection of the moreover/blogger newsblogger project is a certainty.