We had the Daypop 40, and Blogdex, and then PopDex came along. You thought it was over, and people would be content with all this, right?

Wrong. Welcome to BlogPulse - Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs:

BlogPulse Key Phrases and BlogPulse Key People are mined daily from new entries in over 40,000 weblogs using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques. BlogPulse Top Links are the most popular links appearing in weblogs today.

And guess what? This is a project by Intelliseek, a company with investors like Nokia, Lycos, Ford and Chrysalis. [note to self: start a blog company, that's where the money really is.]

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.