Well, it’s interesting. I’m going to have to sit and play with it properly at some point, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. One thouht occurs: it’s a move away from social networking, back to a more web-tradtional approach – the idea here is not that you share content with a taste-tribe or a network of friends, but that you make it available to everyone.

I understand why Google themselves might want this: they’re getting structured data for free, that they can use to make themselves the first port of call for anyone looking for any information ever (and if you aren’t frightened by Google by now, you really should be). But like many others, I don’t see where the incentive for the public to use it is. What value do I derive from putting a copy of the content on here into their “news and articles” database?

I can in fact, see the potential value for a large corporation, from a marketing perspective, and I note that Google Base will take bulk RSS/Atom uploads of content, so in fact, and a reasonably switched-on operation should be able to dump data in there quite fast, but still, I wonder why they’d bother – surely Google will index their web content anyway?

I suspect that this is either another daft experiement, like Orkut (OK, yes, most of Brazil are on Orkut. No-one else is.) or the start of a larger plan for Google.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.