Good news for Bloggers
Some months ago, Google – the world’s favourite search engine bought Pyra Labs – the folks behind Blogger.com. That, of course, meant that blogging was getting serious enough for Google to notice.
More recently, AlwaysOn interviewed Google’s Eric Schmidt on the subject. According to Schmidt :
Ten years ago, before the Mosaic/Netscape phenomenon, the culture in our country really felt very uniform. It felt like everybody was talking about the same things. On a day-to-day basis you didn?t hear a lot of wildly differing views from your own, because you worked with the same people and you read the same stuff and you were busy working on whatever problem you had.
When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.
On a related note, Six Apart (of MovableType fame) has recently announced that they will soon be launching the TypePad Personal Publishing Service !
According to their website :
The makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type weblog software, today announced the upcoming release of TypePad?, a hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart’s popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Building on the established features of Movable Type, TypePad provides weblog publishing with versatile archiving, integrated comments, and customizable designs from a library of attractive and standards-compliant templates. TypePad expands weblog publishing to include integration of text, photos and other media content. The combination of simplicity and comprehensive features will make TypePad the first tool that will empower users, beginners and experts alike, to reach the full potential of the weblog medium.
Good news for bloggers (and wannabe bloggers) all over the world, don’t you think? 🙂
I would be interested to know the level of awareness and the presence of weblogs hosted by indians living in india.Have you come across a catalogue of weblogs that one could access on the net?
* Editor’s Reply *A popular Indian index of bloggers is hosted at http://indianbloggers.blogspot.com/. Rediff also sports an active ‘Blogs’ section at http://blogs.rediff.com/ which sees a lot of traffic from mostly teens. In addition, some international index sites like http://www.weblogs.com maintain a list of recently-updated blogs. But, by and large, the concept of blogging is some time away from reaching the kind of volumes it has the potential of reaching.