As nearly everyone in the world has noticed, Google has a blog now. It’s too bad they didn’t go with the /blog/ URI because this one has extra redundant redundancy, and that doesn’t seem very Google-like. The new blog is very generic, it barely seems like a Blogger blog. On the same day Blogger releases gorgeous XHTML+CSS tempates from Doug and the crew, Google releases its blog with a table-based layout and funky HTML 4 (with no doctype). Also, Blogger uses utf-8 encoding by default now (like WordPress) and Google’s blog uses iso-8859-1.
So there isn’t a lot of information on their blog yet. The first post was signed by Ev, but after that it’s been non-entities writing (and modifying) the posts, which is very weird for a blog. Where to go for more information? Their Atom feed of course. The first thing I noticed was the <id> element, which contained tag:big.corp.google.com,2003:blog-1720. Big corp, ha! So who’s the mysterious author of the two entries after Ev’s?
<author>
<name>A Googler</name>
</author>
Well that’s helpful. Their second post on outsourcing has a more interesting bit of metadata.
<issued>2004-05-10T15:30:52-07:00</issued>
<modified>2004-05-11T17:40:57Z</modified>
<created>2004-05-10T22:39:01Z</created>
Bloggers edit their entries all the time, but “A Googler” actually changed quite a bit, removing a paragraph on outsourcing to India. Perhaps Google is already sharing more than they had planned, but I’ll stop now before they take away my Gmail account.
Someone needs to adapt Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watcher and apply it to Google. 🙂
I’m seeing a lotta people talk about this (Mark Pilgrim etc.) without actually making a judgement on the content itself. Was what they said ‘bad’? Seemed like a reasonable way to call out hypocrisy via juxtaposition.
GO BLOGGER GO!!!!….Wind-it-up and watch it spin frantically!
The Blogger site looks nice…..very nice….haven’t looked at the Google one yet (it’s in tables? Not even in CSS? *gasps*)
Well Matt, I’m only signing here for now….not enough ‘pull’ at other blogs to make me use them instead… 🙂
Did you see how nice the Google Blog Atom feed looks in a Web browser, though? Mark Pilgrim would be proud.
The new Blogger site does indeed look very nice. The google blog fits with the corporate image, but it certainly doesn’t fit with the blogging community’s expected image. Glad to see that they have a blog now, though.
You know it is definetly a way to promote blogger… in a small way. I love the new blogger site :D.
Taken a look at the Google Blog now….
It looks like Google…but for a Blog, the word ‘URGGle’ springs to mind instead!
Blogger is the real deal…while Google’s efforts seem like nothing more than a corporate indulgence of the recent trend.
Well, I think Blogger has a very nice look. But Googleblog…. mmm… wait. They are using Blogger, but the layout, please… Why don’t they have another layout than what they have now?
And about the search thing, “Find on this site”… I thought it is to search entries. In fact, they go to http://googlesite.google.com/ … Because they use Blogger and Blogger does not (yet) support entries search?
Speaking of gmail, I’ll recode/design a page in XHTML/CSS, or do half an hour of PHP work for a gmail invite!