Amid all the chat about whether Google Spreadsheets is another part of Google's strategy to take on Microsoft, it got me thinking about why Google has given so little love to Blogger.com. The blogosphere is exploding with 75,000 new blogs created a day yet Google has really done nothing of significance since buying Blogger.com (Pyra) in 2003. Sure, there have been some improvements but Blogger.com is still more known as the tool of choice for sploggers than a top-notch blogging platform. Google has a so much money and an army of programmers that improving Blogger would seem like a pretty straightforward assignment. They could easily implement a whole bunch of new features (trackbacks would be a good start) and maybe introduce a premium version that includes more bells and whistles. While blogging is becoming more popular, the competitive landscape is still wide open. The top players (Wordpress, Six Apart, Blogware) are small and battling away to build a critical mass of users - and it's seen as big news when Six Part raised a whopping $12-million. Given it's still early days, you figure Google would be smart enough to aggressively jump-start its blog platform strategy rather than "fooling around" with me-too services such as spreadsheets, databases and notepads. Maybe we can't grasp Sergey and Larry's master plan (if, in fact, they have one) but giving Blogger.com some more love seems like a no-brainer.

As a daily newspaper reporter, I get dozens of press releases a day so I was intrigued by Tom Foremski's post (colourfully entitled "Die! Press Release! Die! Die Die!") on how the traditional press release has to evolve. Tom makes an excellent point when he describes press releases as "nearly useless" given they have "a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the back phrases and meaningless quotes". I would add that while press releases are, in theory, designed to generate interest in a service, product, person or company, they often fail to tell an interesting story. Having taken a crack at corporate PR during a start-up stint, I recognize that press releases are difficult beasts to create. But - and this is a big but - they can be much, much better. Tom talks about the use of special sections and tags so a time-strapped journalist can easily pick out the useful information when writing a story. I'd also like to see press releases become dynamic by adding live Web links or maybe a mini-podcast featuring a Q&A with the CEO.
  As well, press release writers really need to start thinking like hacks rather than flacks. They need to start thinking about the best way to tell a story so it sparks enough interest to inspire a journalist to do something. Maybe it leads to a story about the client or maybe it leads to a story that includes the client. Or maybe it just causes the journalist to conciously file away the press release for another day. One more thing: it would also help if press releases coming from high-tech companies would be written in English. After 11 years covering the industry, I'm still amazed to read boiler-plate paragraphs about what a company does to make money - and still have no idea what they actually do or make.