The news of Google acquisition of Pyra Labs has been heralded by many as a watershed event in online information retrieval and processing - this news managed to generate a great deal of excitement as well very pointed and thought provoking discussion-threads.

Discussion Threads:

• The immediate and surefire impact of this acquisition will be on the speed of Blogger-servers. Blogger users know the pain of updating their weblogs. This could also lead to the Blogger team devoting more time to adding interesting features to Blooger and Blogspot rather than being engaged in firefighting for the Blogger uptime.




• As for Google, having a million or so blogs hosted by Blogger - updated by a bunch of heavily opinionated - but mostly geekish - users who are hunting for and analyzing online "breaking news" and tidbits by minutes - as an "intelligent" addition to its web-farm. There are threads of discussion which link this to "Memex" (more on Memex : definitions; the original Memex idea). So don't be surprise that if Google News has a "track it" feature in near feature - despite the negative "cyber-sociological" ramifications ( e.g., I-link-you and you-link-me factor) of this type of development for the Internet as a whole where a few individuals control discussions across the web.




• For the average information seeker/searcher Google might become more instantaneous than it is now, linking breaking news to discussions of it across the various Blogger and Blogspot forums.




• Obviously, given the problems faced by instant-weblogging or CMS users, where design and control is limited to how much technology you know. The Blogger + Google combination can go a long way in creating a better manageability and controllability in instant publishing software user-experience as well as developing and enforcing standards for inter-polarity between different software: namely MovableType (link) Radio and Blogger. Google + Blogger combination has an advantage over others because of Google's search capability and its present affinity to Weblogs.




• There are discussions which place this whole hype into a very typical pattern of Google's desire to become a portal. This school of thought tells us that don't read too much into this event - as all the blog-pundits have done so far - this acquisition is nothing more than say Yahoo's acquisition of Geocities. Just another plain and simple technique to sell more context-based AdWords.

Google + Blogger and Enterprise information and knowledge management solutions

It's interesting to note that those of us who are in the business of creating information and knowledge management solutions for enterprises, get generally swayed by the might of Google, and the fear that it will just replicate its success in the enterprise space - especially so when Google does something new!. This thinking is not new, and could be deemed as a residual effect of the late 90s dot-com boom where the Internet was feared as a phenomenon which will make traditional businesses bankrupt.

I think the information and knowledge challenges faced by an enterprise are different than general internet-based information management challenges.

• One of the facets of the Internet that fascinates many of us, is its immense potential for information discovery. Because of the vast and dynamic nature of the web, you are constantly discovering new pieces of information - to the extent that for some of us, it almost become an addiction, a habit - an information "transporting". The chances of information being "discovered" inside an organization are rare, unless you are working for a mega-corporation spread across a vast geographical area.
• Of course, there are majority of searchers who come to search engines with very specific information needs and those information needs may be very similar to the need of a knowledge worker searching for information inside an enterprise - but similarity ends there.
• Besides, Google has been able to intelligently use the link structure on the Internet to anchor its searches to relevancy and a meaningful context making it easy for the searcher to find what they want. This link-structure is not available inside an enterprise hence there is a need to find other anchors which would infuse intelligence into information retrieval process for an organization.


The enterprise information and knowledge management solutions vendors and consultants will and should continue their search for the anchors which will turn the vast unstructured information stores of organizations into minable data with an easy to explain ROI.