Google and bloggers, why not?
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 by Dave Winer

I've been thinking about turning Scripting News into some kind of a book ever since I started writing here. But I'm a blogger not a book writer. I'm more of a serial writer than a strategic one.  I write threads not plots. Although I'm sure there are plots buried in the threads. Repeating themes. If only I knew how to extract them.

With news that Google has a piece of software that plays Go better than the best human being, you can't help but wonder if the algorithmeteers at Google, or Facebook even, couldn't produce data from the linkage both within my blog and to and from the outside world, to show me which are the pivotal pieces in the 22-year-history of this blog, and even better, what are the themes. I imagine that with enough work they could probably even put the book together automatically. 

More interesting Google news. They hired Chris Poole, the founder of 4Chan, to breathe life into Google-Plus community site. It's good that they understand that forming and nurturing community is a human thing, that some people are good at. Google already owns Blogger. Community is all around them. What if they loved Google Reader instead of killing it? How much better would that have been.

It's funny that Google has been such an adversary over the years. Sometimes very willfully trying to erase my work, when if we worked together, some great results might come of it. For example, what if Google decided to embrace Facebook's IA format. I would help them figure it out. It's a totally ripe invitation for interop, and adding power to the open web, which also adds power to Google, I believe.

PS: I wrote about this in 2015 and probably many more times over the years. If only I knew where! :-)