The news that Google bought Pyra, implementers and service providers for Blogger, has been kicking around The RSS Network for a few days. It's a big net out there, but here's a question I have.
Why didn't they buy UserLand, LiveJournal, or Six Apart?
LiveJournal has a huge user community, but is mostly a grass roots, open source effort. There's really nothing to buy.
Some will claim that Dave Winer's irascible personality might preclude purchase by anybody. That would be bad business and I'm guessing wouldn't matter to Google. Mavericks and Google go together. Plus, UserLand has been marketing Radio Userland as a knowledge logging tool, making it buzzword compliant for a number of corporations. The UserLand blogging code base is mostly in UserTalk, a language which is probably a bit foreign to Google. Digesting UserLand would be easier from the user base perspective, but harder from the code base perspective.
Six Apart is more interesting. MovableType is currently the most popular tool of thought leaders in the weblogging community. Especially those working on infrastructure hacks, although content folks are starting to swing around too. It's amazingly well engineered and Perl isn't completely anathema to Google. The team is small and well respected. The only missing piece of the puzzle is a large centralized community of users.
Conclusion: Google wanted a community to help better guide Google News. As a bonus, they get a codebase that they can easily digest and turn into a corporate product. On top of it all, by making Blogger more reliable, Google does good for a large number of users. The Blogger team still has a bit of a rep and they can call upon the Google smarties to try and get back out in front of, or at least near, the technology leaders.
Oh, and they beat Microsoft and AOL to the weblogging tool punch.