by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
We knew this was coming, we could sense it in our teeth. Google have started an official Google Blog. It's your chance to read about new technology, hot issues and the world of searches straight from the Googleplex itself.Andrew Girdwood
A blog is a simple creature at heart. It's a journal or diary and it is published on the Internet rather than scrawled lazily into a padlocked book hidden in a desk. Most blogs are often more sophisticated than that and offer a range of added extras. Live Journal, for example, lets their bloggers protect their online journals so only their friends, rather than strangers, can read their writing, or journals can be kept entirely private.
Google is using the Blogger.com blogging technology for its own blog. This isn't surprising; Google bought Blogger.com over a year ago. At the time the "noise" generated by the writings of the blogging community was taking up a significant percentage of the best results for Google searches. The noise isn't so bad now, Google's algorithm evolved.
One of the main reasons why the noise of blogging authors managed to rise so high in Google's results is that blogs can easily be interlinked. Those wishing to integrate the official Google Blog into their own blog or news aggregator can use the syndication feed provided by Google at http://www.google.com / googleblog / atom.xml .
Syndication is a hot topic. Early blogs where built around RSS (really simple syndication) and today we see the likes of the BBC and Reuters provide (free for personal use) RSS feeds of their news stories. Bigmouthmedia does too. Yahoo is very active on the RSS front, has a specialised RSS seeking spider, is building an RSS directory and notes the presence of RSS feeds in Yahoo search results. RSS has a rival in the form of Atom. Atom is a fairly recent addition to the syndication fields and where, at the time of writing, RSS is up to version 2.0, Atom is still in 0.3 - not even a full, finalised, version. Atom is more precise than RSS but it is not so simple. The debate as to whether RSS or Atom would come to dominate the syndication stakes rose in temperature when Google announced their support for Atom. Those wishing to use the syndication feed of the Google Blog will be using an Atom formatted feed.
