Google Blogoscoped

Sunday, July 13, 2003

German Google News Interview

The German Netzzeitung interviewed Michael Schmitt, Technical Director of German Google News. Here’s a partial translation:

Netzeitung: Was it difficult to adapt the English Google News service for the German Web?

Michael Schmitt: The two essentials of the system (extracting headline and text of an HTML news page, as well as grouping related articles) were developed as language-neutral as possible. That made it relatively easy to prototype a German Google news.

It was slightly harder to adjust the quality of the topic selection for the German front-page. That’s somewhat simpler for English: English news content will be published around the whole globe. Which means the article (or theme) groups are much larger. (...)

Netzeitung: Why did you chose to target the German market?

Schmitt: We’re always trying to have our services cover as many languages as possible. Germany is one of the most important markets for us. We got more than 14 million users in Germany.”
– Ben Schwan, Google News: “Wir machen Medien keine Konkurrenz” (Netzeitung), July 10 2003

AOL Starts Blogging

Today, Leslie Walker in Web Watch brings news of AOL releasing a web-log publishing software this summer. Named “AOL Journals” to not cause any confusion amongst its 34 million members, the addition to America Online’s new “9.0 Optimized” should have serious blogosphere impact.
In the mean-time, TypePad showcased their new blog app to beta-subscribers. It’s working smoothly for this early stage.

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