I find it interesting that Google has purchased Blogger's parent company Pyra, since I wonder what opportunity Google sees in the company. It obviously has a large user base, and Google's newer products like the news front end and image search seem to be about improving access to information (or knowledge, I guess), but I really don't see the connection. Of course, I really don't see the use in the Google Viewer, either. Pyra was trying to move into selling Blogger as a tool for enterprise deployments, sort of like the Googlebox, I guess.
I wonder if Google will develop blog analysis tools like Blogdex and Technorati. Former Pyra employee Meg Hourihan says she's working on a similar project to develop a more robust blog analysis product.
I just tried the Google Viewer for the first time. Call me a laggard ;-) I found it sort of cool in a "I'm lazy and just want to browse results without trying a really streamlined search" kind of way.
For accessibility reasons, it has interesting potential, although the jscript menus mean a person has to be quick-on-the-draw to stop when they want to look more closely at something.
You can hit the "turtle" button to slow down the slideshow. One of my beefs with the viewer is it doesn't like CSS very much. My personal site is rendered as text in the viewer.
Posted by: mcchris on February 18, 2003 01:03 AM