Well, for anyone who still had their doubts about whether blogs were a big deal or not, Google has made the decision for you: yes, and they've just rescued Blogger.com (via its parent company, Pyra, a small San Francisco firm run by co-founder Evan Williams). Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Merc had the scoop.

I say rescued because I've remained a Blogger.com user long after many more experienced bloggers switched to more stable and feature-rich competitors, such as Moveable Type or pMachine. I have myself been planning to make the jump as soon as I had more time to putter with the backend, as the promise of long-overdue upgrades to the site has been frustrating, but I'm glad now that I held out. I see why upgrade release schedules kept slipping, if Evan has been making a deal on this magnitude his priority. In the long run, this is best for everyone, and I expect to see the upgrade now get the funding and attention it deserves.

Meanwhile, beyond one user's gripings, this deal is obviously huge for both search, as Nick Denton points out (suggesting that Google News would do well to weight blogs as a filter to improve relevancy) and for blogging. Anil Dash argues that it's not a great fit for Google, as Blogger has lost much marketshare among blogging tools of late, and Google has no experience running a consumer online software service or a paid product model (like Blogger Pro). Those are all decent points, but my feeling is that Google has enough money to experiment with all of the above, and I'm sure they didn't pay a fortune for Blogger. And, considering what a small team Pyra is, they already do a remarkably good job running all of the above, if they only had more resources to put into programming, bug fixing, feature development, etc. Those kinds of resources Google has in spades, as well as strong management and vision.

I think it's an excellent fit. Regardless of how Google chooses to develop the Blogger.com service itself, a major player in the online media space has made a serious bet that blogs are going to be something worthwhile for the long term. And that in itself is what's most important in this news. Blogs have arrived. They've reached the tipping point, crossed the chasm, whatever you want to call it.

Want further proof? Check out Bruner.net/RichardW -- my 76-year-old dad's blog. I just set it up for him. Using Blogger, of course. (Remains to be seen whether he ends up using it.)

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