I was curious to see what Dave Winer would eventually say about the Blogger deal, because he is behind the rival weblog building tool Radio Userland. As it turns out he's broadly supportive of the deal, hopes the Pyra folk made lots of money, and hints that he's got a similar deal with someone else in the pipeline.
But I suspect he's wrong about one thing: Google didn't do this deal to "just help out the internet" having seen that Blogger was "struggling, and that it's a good thing, and they should support it, much as they support Usenet". There are plenty of good business reasons for Google to do the deal, and an altruistic desire to do the right thing by the net probably didn't figure too high in their reasoning. Or is that harsh?
