As Dan Gillmor reports: Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time. Pyra Labs is the company owned by Evan Williams which runs the Blogger software and the Blog*Spot blog-hosting service.
This is going to be an interesting time in the blogging world. Tripod just started a blogging service for its members, Salon is offering a blogging service, Movable Type has announced a “Pro” version for release this summer, and AOL & MSN will probably be rolling their own services out very soon. On the education front, Harvard Law School has started a blogging project, run by Dave Winer, creator of the popular blooging tool, Radio. There are plenty of other blogging projects going on in schools and universities all over the country. A great place to look for them is at the Edublog Web ring, or at Weblogg-ed.
This is Google’s first foray into providing original content, so it should be interesting to see how they handle some of the issues it raises.

• Many users of other weblogging software (including this one) rely on the Google Web APIs to provide relevance searching.
  How will Google’s ownership of competing software affect this relationship?
• Google has recently been sued by a company called Searchking over Google’s proprietary PageRank technology and the effect it’s had on Searchking’s business of advising other companies how to improve their Google rankings.
  Now that Google will own blogs, how will they ensure that competing blogs are given fair treatment in any rankings?
• There’s recently been a resurgence in interest about Google’s privacy policy. As explained here, Google places a cookie on your machine which ties your IP address to every search you make on their system. As Aaron Swartz says, “Actions by the current US government make it clear they don’t care about privacy, and it’s very likely that they’ve convinced Google to hand over full logs of who is searching for what.” Although there are ways to avoid this intrusion, many users of blogging software are politically opposed to privacy intrusions of any kind.
  Will Google finally address this issue?
• Google’s new News service collects news stories from websites all over the globe, then assembles a newspaper without editorial oversight.
  Will Google begin including blogs among its news sources?
• There are a number of blog indexes currently operating, including Blogdex, Blo.gs, Popdex, and Daypop. These sites, which focus exclusively on blog-based content, are more focused and reflect the issues and ideas surfacing in blogs much more rapidly than Google is able to.
  Will Google create a competitor to these sites, and will it be inclusive of all blogging software, or be focused exclusively on Blogger?

One of the greatest features of Google has been its lack of proprietary interest in the content of the websites it indexes. The challenge to the company will be to maintain that fairness now that it is becoming a provider of content.