As you know, Google just purchased Pyra, the company behind Blogger.com. Many people are wondering what this may mean for Weblogs and the Web in general.
I just found on Slashdot a link to this long rant entitled “The Realities of Online Reputation Management”; here’s a single sentence I found interesting:
I don’t think we can look to Google turning itself into an opinion-molder, “Pagerank” notwithstanding.
Well, I think the author is almost exactly wrong :-) I’m currently reading Smart Mobs and its discussions around the need for “workable, trustworthy reputation systems” (e.g. on smartmobs.com) in the decentralized world of the Web (much better reading than the article above), and I think that Google+Blogger has exactly the power to do that, via its PageRank system applied to Weblog contents. Something like Daypop’s Top 40 on steroids, mixed with Slashdot’s moderation system.
It sounds simple: Blogger members can “mod up” other posts just by linking to them. Google can measure a post “score” through its PageRank algorithm, focusing on Blogger pages (and, hopefully, other Weblogs too). Members whose posts get “modded up” (linked to) a lot will get higher “Karma”, and they will influence the score of posts they link to. This is just a basic extension of the current PageRank system.
And this could probably tie nicely into Google News too: for each top story, get some insightful comment from the most reputed Blogger members. At least this would give Google users an alternative to the Big Media view of things.