A week late, but today New York Times business section report on the Pyra acquisition by Google. First reported by Dan Gillmor and reported here Live From the Blogosphere. There's already been much opined about this acquisition so I won't bore you with more, but I did think the following was worthy of noting.
Google's attempt to automate news gathering on its news page (news.google.com) is still under development but has already earned some ridicule from journalists […] for example, Google News was more than an hour behind human-powered sites CNN.com and Yahoo News with word of the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia.
So how will the chattering of Blogger's 200,000 active users help Google improve its news judgment? The deal may be less about chatter than about links, said Meg Hourihan, who founded Pyra with Mr. Williams in 1999 and left in 2001 after a dispute over its direction, keeping a stake in the company. Ms. Hourihan said she was not familiar with Google's plans, but she said that it made sense for Google to be interested in gaining faster access to the links in Weblogs.
You can read the full length article here.
