“Just like everybody should have at least one friend who owns a truck, everybody should know at least one Matt Welch…” Howard Owens writes.

Went to see Amherst play Bowdoin Saturday in the first round of the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Bowdoin started a 6’6” freshman from Iowa City, Iowa who looks like a stretched Rick Bruner. The kid played with a nonchalant excellence that could be easily mistaken for arrogance, blocking shots, tossing headfakes, scrambling by fleeter-looking players. But he missed a bunch of easy shots in the first few minutes that probably cost Bowdoin the game. The game was much closer than the final score, 78-67, looks.

“Two years ago… weather.com, the Web site of cable television’s Weather Channel, ran on 80 Sun servers. Today, the data center for weather.com is filled with 123 Intel-based servers running Linux ‘ and Sun was sent packing. The savings on hardware were $2.3 million, according to Dan Agronow, vice president for technology at weather.com, who added that maintenance costs were lower, too.” Link.

Blogcritics offer their albums of the year.

Welcome to Christopher Scheer. As one of the only incisive, funny and self-deprecating liberal bloggers, Scheer could go into orbit contra Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds. He’s already been noticed by CNN.

Scheer joins Prague alumni Amy, Ben, Matt, and Ken. Rumors of Doug on the verge.

Everyone is puzzled by Google’s purchase of Blogger.

Google likely was not after either blogging brainpower and technology, since it didn’t employ investment-banking SOP and talk to other blogtech players before making the purchase.

Yet Google couldn’t have been after Blogger’s content. As Dave Winer puts it, “Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn’t buy their content, because Pyra doesn’t own it, the users do. They didn’t buy access to the content because they already had it.”

In fact, Google does not “have it.” Google doesn’t really index Blogger-produced- or-hosted content, at least, very effectively. Want proof? Search Google for Blogger + Google… and you get a bunch of Movable Type sites. Of the leading Blogging tech providers, Blogger was the only one that doesn’t handle Google particularly well.

So maybe the explanation for this buyout is mundanely technical: perhaps Google does want to improve Noogle by including more blogs. But Google knows that Pyra, the biggest blog host, doesn’t have the resources (or desire?) to hack the minute-by-minutes swarms of freshbots that feed Noogle. Maybe Google wished Blogger put headlines into the title tag so posts would get their fair PR and be Google-user friendly. (Look at Evhead’s titleless posts in Google and you’ll realize just how annoying Blogger entries are when seen through Google’s eyes.)

Was trading a few Google shares for Blogger the fastest way to improve Noogle? (Or to block Microsoft from acquiring Pyra and quietly reducing Blogger’s Google-friendliness?)

“Bindy” Lambton’s roller-coaster obituary. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Ernie the attorney gets an e-mail about the three stages of blog awareness. (Via Dave Winer.)

These comments on the Google/blogger post at the fine Blogroots throw up the idea that Google bought Blogger to add to its menu of corporate offerings. After all, selling knowledge management tools to companies for $100,000 a piece is a lot more fun (for most) than selling sites for $29.95. Someone also points out that the Google hasn’t yet put out a press-release. While this is a big deal for Bloggers and blogging, is it a big deal for Google? Finally, here’s a link to the essay that first imagined Google.

Tireless Hylton Jolliffe is the superlative blog digester. I just wish he’d tell us what he thinks about it all.