Scoble’s Link Blog

Ever since Mary Hodder’s blog posting, it seems like the whole Blogosphere has been buzzing about the rumor that AskJeeves will announce on Tuesday that it is buying Bloglines. Given that there is no official word yet, I checked Mark Fletcher’s blog (CEO of Bloglines) to see if there were any hints buried there… What did I find? Cat Pictures! Personally, I find that to be massively funny… Maybe it really is true that cat pictures are the primary subject of blogs.

It is interesting to think for a minute what it will mean if a solid second-tier retrospective search company like AskJeeves starts competing with Feedster, Technorati, WayPath, IceRocket, etc. It is possible that what we’re going to see is a wave of second tier search vendors all trying to fight to find a niche by capturing the blog search space. (These guys can’t hope to win in the main "web search" business… They must find a niche.) Then, it is inevitable that the first tier folk (i.e. Google, MSN, Yahoo) would be forced to follow suit. But by the time the first tier folk respond, one of the second tier players may have been able to create a sustainable and loyal user base. The play-out of this game might lead to rapid consolidation through buyouts of the existing blog search engines… or the big guys might just decide to use their own existing search engines (Their search engines are already much more reliable and much more powerful then the home-grown search engines that currently serve the retrospective blog search space… and, their crawlers could be driven by FeedMesh!…)

Of course, once all the search engines are finally providing retrospective blog search, the interesting question will be: "Who will be first to work with folk like us at Pubsub.com to incorporate prospective search into their offerings?"…

Whatever the case, I’m sure that the real story is going to be much more interesting  and exciting than Mark’s cat pictures — even though they are really nice looking cats.

    bob wyman