In their recent story–Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger?–the folks at Wired hit the nail right on the head… As I am so fond of saying, blogs are the organic meta-datafarms of the future. And Google’s relevance (hence their accuracy and their market value) is derived from links created by people within some context…and weblogs are an especially rich source of this nutrient.
This article explains some of the rationale, especially the significance of RSS feeds and the ‘semantic web’ :-)
So, anyway, this is yet another move that shows how brilliantly self-organizing the Internet really is. It’s almost like these companies didn’t even have a choice…this was their destiny!