The wonderful weirdness of print publishing schedules means that the latest issue of internet magazine contains a news story about Google buying Blogger – a full five weeks after the story broke online. It’s got a few comments from me in it – which I think always greatly improves a publication – but even apart from my individual wisdom, the article itself is pretty cool. But enough about them…
Tom Coates, author of the opinionated Plasticbag weblog (www.plasticbag.org) said webloggers themselves have been sorting out the Web’s content for some time. ‘There are a million webloggers out there, all writing stuff and linking to things in neatly organised and timely chunks,’ he said.
‘Webloggers are collectively, hyperactively and accidentally making sense of the Web. So it’s not so much about categorising weblog content as it is about using them to categorise everything!’
Coates said he doubted that there’d be a Google News of weblogs, but thought that their links would be used to “add value” to existing news coverage. “Putting some of the good weblog posts at the end of conventional online news reports might bring that kind of context and grass-roots reaction back into online news,” he said.
God knows if I did say all that. It sounds pretty good though, so I’m not going to protest. I even agree with most of it…