Wired News, presumably desperately trying to catch up with a story they (and many others) left unreported for two days after it broke on the blogosphere, leads this weekend on Google's purchase of Blogger.
Seeing the headline, it was hard to imagine Wired had anything new to add to the debate. But reporter Leander Kahney (taking a break from writing those infuriating "Mac users: aren't they a scream" stories) manages to give us something fresh: a (presumably, rather pissed off) search engine developer who was working on a Blogger search facility until January, when discussions were broken off.
They were working on "real-time" search of weblog postings - no surprise given Evan William's musings in an interview last year, or even in his most recent postings on his own weblog (before he stopped updating).
"[Chris] Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs," reports Kahney, coming to the conclusion dozens of webloggers had arrived at around six days ago. Still, at least it's confirmation of what was going on at Pyra (although, with no talk of broken contracts or money being exchanged, it seems negotiations must have been at a very early stage).
Maybe I'm being unfair. But it's been an interesting story to cover, this - one so fast developing it has left even new media trailing in its wake, even though it was first broken by a print journalist writing on his website (for which Dan Gillmor deserves enormous credit). But once the cat was out the bag, only the way, way new media (weblog media, in the main) has been able to keep up - along with the Guardian's leader on Tuesday, of course :-).
It's certainly the first time I've worked on a story in this order: weblog post first, web analysis second, newspaper story third. That's interesting in a whole bunch of ways, even though we've got to be cautious about what we draw from the experience. This was - after all - a story about weblogs, and the internet.
