Blogger decides to upgrade
all their users to the Pro level. An obvious attempt to stay afloat after MT and Typepad's deluge, but they have to even better than this to actually survive.

I've started DanoReview to serve as an outsider's observation of the new Blogger. Co-authors invited.

I made some additions to my link-list, so I should introduce them as well:

Amit Agarwal: This 'Netahoy' gizmo dude is the only other Delhi blogger I know.

Anita Bora: Rediff's shining star. Also keeper of the Indian Blogger's List, a insurmountable feat in itself, considering it's a single HTML file.

Cameron Marlow: That dude who created Blogdex. Also Ph.D. student at the Media Lab. and also into the music scene. Not exactly role model, but something incredibly close.

Gaurav Sabnis: CEO in the making at IIM Lucknow. He's in the list because of the Calvin&Hobbes cartoon on his page. Also because of the content, but the cartoon ownz.

NewzCrawler is becoming my weapon of choice to handle the evergrowing list of weblogs I read. The aggregator helps me organize my blogs, and a simple F5 polls all the RSS feeds from the blogs and gets me all the new posts.

However, life would be a lot easier if some of my favourite blogs had some syndication mechanism in place. So people, please go to Mark Gardner's website, where you

In retrospect, the Testbed Theory maybe a little far out, but now I'm almost sure that Google bought Blogger to bolster its Google News thingy. You see, Google News has a very slow response time - it took the Columbia mishap 6 hours to appear on the top of the page. On the other hand, millions of blogs had found out and reported a lot about it within minutes (including me). So it is for those six hours that Google will be using Blogger's data. Or so I think.

Have you noticed the footer of Google News? It's changed from

No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page

to

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

The new line accomodates the possibility that blogs were involved.

Google buys Pyra! This is major. Ev, Jason and the gang rollerblading in the GooglePlex... hmm.

Everyone seems to be wondering why this happened - as in, what use is a content hosting service to a search company?
A lot of people are saying that there's going to be a "Blogs" tab now, beside the News and other tabs. Some people are also wondering if Blogspot sites will get a better pagerank.

But why buy Pyra? Why not just get 20 people to build Blogger in a month? Here's what I think: It's all about the data™. In Page and Brin's paper - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - the base assumption was that the WWW is a huge interlinked connection of information. And you know what's incredibly funny? The Blogosphere is just that - a small scale WWW.