Sharing the Blog Love: Google
Yep, its the company people either love or hate, and we all know their do no evil motto is a crock, but at the end of the day its time to spread some blog love to the folks at Google, who despite launching crappy betas every 5 minutes (Google Analytics anyone….hang on a sec I’m still waiting for it to load) Google has done an awful lot for the Blogosphere. Aside from Google search which I must use 50 times every day (I switch between the US and Australian sites via Firefox as well), there are 3 big things we should love Google for.
1. Buying Blogger
When Google bought Blogger the blogosphere was a lot smaller than it was today, and people sat up and took notice. Sure, they didn’t create Blogger but their purchase gave an immediate boost to the legitimacy of the blogosphere as having value and one could argue helped create the boom (or as some would argue bubble) that we see in blogging today.
2. Adsense
Before Adsense there was BlogAds and not much else. Adsense did more to legitimise advertising on blogs than any over service and provided widespread money making opportunities for many, many bloggers (even if its only a couple of dollars a month for many, its still nice).
3. Matt Cutts
Although I’ve referred to Matt as being evil in the past for befriending comment spammers, any guy who makes a living out of getting SEO’s and Blackhats pissed so he can get them to blurt out their secrets is a good bloke in my books….oh, and he writes a blog about Google from the inside that helps us understand how it works as well.
So to all the Google staff, we do appreciate you, and heres some blog love to make your day :-)
Well, sure buying Blogger gave a boost to Blogger & the blogosphere. But what you neglect to mention is that they bought a crappy blogging platform and didn’t really improve it much. Or at least didn’t improve it as fast or as well as their competitors improved their platforms. That’s why I left Blogger over two years ago, first for Typepad & not for WordPress.
I’ve got plenty of good things to say about Google. But Blogger isn’t one of ’em.
Sorry…that should’ve read “first for Typepad and NOW for WordPress.”
Hey, my only mistake was forgetting gmail! I love gmail. All me email gets forwarded to it, their spam filter is first rate!!!! :-)
Google is a lot like Computer Associates when CA was at it’s peak. They’d acquire new technologies or technologies they could improve upon, market them, and pretty much forget about them. I believe the market lingo is “the product sells itself”.
Google also bought the newsgroup archives from Deja News. I was glad cause I missed being able to read the old posts, the really oldies from when the newsgroups actually were good. Poor old newsgroups aren’t much use now but I’d be sad to see them completely gone.
The value of newsgroups still exist, you just have to wade through all the spam. I used to frequent a lot of the comp.* newsgroups, occasional alt.*’s, but when it comes down to it, Usenet is dead.