] Google has bought Blogger. Forget those peace protests ] around the world on Saturday: there is nothing more ] interesting to the weblog community than the weblog ] community, and this was the news of the weekend. ] What, you might ask, has happened? Put simply, the ] world's favourite search engine has bought one of the ] companies that pioneered the online diary, or weblog. ] Google now owns a service that makes it easy to publish a ] weblog, as well as an archive that holds the text from ] more than one million weblogs, 200,000 of which are ] active today. ] Naturally, the story was broken via breathless weblog ] postings. Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News had ] learnt of the story and produced a special edition of his ] column to break it. Evan Williams, the chief executive of ] Pyra (the company that gave birth to Blogger) read ] Gillmor's story, which was published unexpectedly early, ] and announced the takeover at a US blogging event on ] Saturday afternoon. Guardian Unlimited | Online | Google gets Blogger and better |