Dave Winer on the Deal:

It’s probably a good thing for blogging, and probably also a good thing for Blogger’s competitors because it’s likely to suck in other Google-like companies. It’s great that Google decided to buy rather than make. I wouldn’t be surprised if the other popular blogging tools had similar deals cooking.

So the idea of being able to provide blog systems is attracting “Google-like” companies.  These are Portals (this term is morphing so fast,  as evidenced by the gold rush mentality they have taken on re: the “gold in them thar hills they see in Weblogs),  and so hooking themselves up this rapidly expanding Web framework is a move to expand the valuye of their “network”.  The value of  a network increases with the number of nodes,  and the Weblog universe is “node-producing”.  The myriad ways of interlinking between weblogs and other Web services (through XML) is spreading the tentacles of interactivity.