A while ago I was musing about Blogger. I noticed something was different about them when they dropped the requirements for having a “Oh, look, Blogger is cool” button on your site. In addition, they are one of the only free Blog services that doesn’t let you pay for it if you want to. (LiveJournal offers paid accounts, and Xanga offers the worst of both worlds: advertising AND bugging you to get the ‘premium edition’)

So anyway, why doesn’t Google want money from bloggers? My theory: to them, what bloggers provide is worth more than money to them. Think about it—most free blog sites have to charge for their servers and bandwidth. Google is different; they have a huge pipe and the most powerful supercomputer known to man available to them.

So what does Google, whose stated goal is to organize the world’s information, need? Well, the one thing their supercomputers can’t provide—intelligence. Computers can’t determine the relationship between pages without help from humans. The fact that humans like providing this valuable information to Google is extremely convenient.