Doc has some questions about Google re: their acquisition, Blogger.

So here’s my question for the day. Why has Google improved Blogger so little since it bought the platform from Pyra in early 2003. In blog years, 2003 is somewhere back in the Triassic. Consider all the work Google has done with its mail and office services, with maps, with Google Earth… and so little to integrate any of those with Blogger. Why?

(Unless I have that wrong. Do I? You tell me. I’m not a Blogger user, except as a frustrated poster of comments. But I am an observer, and from this angle I’ve seen remarkably few improvements, considering, over the years.)

I suggest for Christmas that Blogger users give Google positive and useful suggestions for making Blogger a leading blogging platform, for integrating it better with the rest of the Web, and for making it add to Google’s otherwise well-deserved reputation as a builder of ground-breaking apps and services.

Source: The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, November 24, 2006

It does raise a serious point.  Why WOULDN’T they leverage this massive networking connectivity,  as talented as they obviously are?  It seems like quite a state of neglect.

I feel the same way about the mainline churches and this massive online audience.  So much conversation and discussion,  and yet so little attention being paid,  and so little real effort and resources aimed at leveraging or understanding it.  And I don’t mean “leveraging” in the sense of “getting a piece of the pie”,  but as in “being present” and participating,  and utilizing the ubiquity of the tools so that the church can appear,  at least to its members who ARE online,  that it is at the center of life in some compelling way.