Dave Winer comments on Google's excessive use of new graphics for their top logo. It has got out of hand, and very much so for those of us still using slower connections. The constantly changing logo significantly slows down the page load, and reduces the Gooogle experience. Another sign?

Dave Winer, in his Morning coffee notes today, makes one of the best points I've seen in the seemingly endless blogging about blogging, and which I've (briefly) added to here, noting the virtues of weblogs in comparison to your average discussion group mailing list:

"...it's clear that some of the people there don't understand why weblogs are superior to discussion groups. Briefly, DGs are like mail lists. All it takes is one stinker to grind the whole thing to a halt. If everyone has their own weblog, people can flame all they want in their own space, but mostly they just attract other losers. And people are less likely to whine uncontrollably in their own lonely space. It's got their name on it, and it reflects poorly on them, more than it does on the people they're complaining about."

Googling down?
There are signs that Google is hitting a wall as a organisation. The e-mail to Dave Winer is one possible example of this, and I have a similar e-mail with a totally proforma response. The rather peculiar launch of their Google-in-a-box, with its odd pricing suggests that their inevitable need for more professional management is having an effect on the spontaneity of the company. Of course 'professional' doesn't have to mean 'narrow', but it is a fact that in the circumstances that Google finds themselves in, they end up giving responsibility to 'deadeners' or risk-averse managers (perhaps the normal breed anyway). Could this be the first intimations of mortality? And is it linked to Eric Schmidt's arrival as CEO? Quote:"Eric is a natural fit with our corporate culture." Perhaps he isn't.

Oh, no!
The amount of bandwidth occupied by webloggers writing about the act of logging is getting out of proportion. Could it be that blogging about blogging is an end in itself, and easier than more wideranging writing? It would be a shame if the technical facility to publish widely without the traditional publishing structure ended up being spurned because of the self-referential nature of most of the prose. I'd suggest that maybe some more substantive writing might be the best way to demonstrate at this stage that weblogs are more than just egotistical outpourings.

See a new Wired article, and Dennis Mahoney's weblog for more informed comment on webloggers self-awareness (and yes, I am aware that I am contributing via this post).

A huge piece on Blogger and Evan Williams in today's Online section of the Guardian newspaper. The online piece doesn't have the huge picture of Evan that adorns the printed piece. The online version also fails to reproduce the hyperlink to Blogger (apart from a stray '('). The peice doesn't add much to what has been published elsewhere or in discussions on various websites, but it does suggest that the final price for Blogger Pro might be $60. I had previously seen only $50 mentioned. $60 might be a dollar too far, particularly if the rate of development doesn't match and ideally exceed that from Userland and Movable Type.

The end of the piece has Evan commenting on his interest in creating some knid of metablo tool: "So what if someone who takes the meta approach to this said: 'Give me all the MacWorld stuff, I'll edit it and pull out the best,' with the publishers' permission, of course? ... It's the collective intelligence factor that you see a little bit of in the blogging world, but which I think isn't exploited nearly as much as it could be. It's the next exciting phase."


Evan implies that the approach would be to have a human editor making the choices and decisions. I suspect that a fully automated approach is more likely and just as practical. Google has recently started to index a number of weblogs certainly within twelve hours, and possibly faster for some. If it used say weblog.com and one or two other notifiers, it could index the limited changes in near-real-time. By adding a facility to search using some form of proximity measures as well as simple full-text: voila, a filtered list of topic comments which could be delivered into a webpage, along the lines of Radio's NewsAggregator.