Why Google Will Merge Orkut and Blogger

Veronis and Suhler Stevenson (VSS) sees a day fast approaching when we will be over-saturated in media, according to this TelevisionWeek report. I believe it. If there's one thing problematic with the Information Age it is that there's just too much to take in!

Currently I subscribe to about 350 "real" news and blog feeds using FeedDemon and Bloglines. Many of these, particularly the blogs, are filled with thousands of pearls of wisdom. Despite these powerful aggregation tools, I find it impossible to read all these feeds and end up scanning probably about half (at most) on a daily basis. The problem is going to only escalate as online publishing becomes cheaper and easier. I find new blogs to read almost every day.

Thankfully, despite the gloomy VSS predictions, Google will again free us from information clutter, just as they have done time and again. They will eventually merge their Orkut social networking site and Blogger Web publishing system to establish communities of "trusted bloggers." A unified Blogger/Orkut platform will make it easier for us to identify the most credible/valuable bloggers who write about the subjects that matter to us. The system will be even better than the tools we use now to measure influence, such as Technorati. Some are already experimenting with such a model, but Google will prevail.

You can already see the early beginnings of this in Blogger's recent relaunch. Google is grouping bloggers into discrete communities. Orkut has an eerily similar community system. I can easily envision a day when Google will realize the tremendous power of merging these platforms into a single entity that facilitates information publishing/sharing and retrieval -- if they haven't already.

IMHO, this will all make our job - reaching online influencers - just a little bit easier.