A year in Google blogging

The definition of "googol" is a number, and Google lives by numbers. So how else should we look back over the year but with numerical bits? Here goes: This post marks the 294th time this year you're reading a post from us -- that's nearly 100 more posts than in 2005. In the last 12 months, we unveiled 24 new products here. We wrote up 128 product upgrades, new features and how-to-use-it items. We told you about 7 acquisitions. We blogged about policies or issues 23 times, on subjects including Google in China, how Book Search works, click fraud, and Net Neutrality. Google.org yielded 7 posts, and 29 times we said various services are available in many countries and languages. Then there was a pug, Google's custom It's It, our compelling matchmaking service, and a nearly-cosmic Stardate.

More for the numerically inclined: 7.6 million unique visitors generated nearly 15 million pageviews this year. Aside from the U.S. and UK, readers come from India, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands. Which sites send us the most readers? The top non-Google referrers this year are the influential Digg.com and Slashdot.

But we didn't just hope that readers would come to us. We also launched company blogs in China, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, and Russia (and more are coming in 2007). We also launched AdSense-specific blogs for publishers who speak Dutch, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Product teams also started up quite a roster of new blogs covering everything from Custom Search Engines to Google Book Search to our Mac and Enterprise endeavors. If you want to keep current with nearly 40 corporate blogs we now publish, here's the Atom feed, the Google Reader share option, and the OPML file (English language blogs only).

Which posts caught your eye? Apart from the front page, these were among the most popular:

• Google Earth for Macs
• our (classic?) 2005 explanation of how "Googlebombing" works
• downloading public domain books
• Gmail open signup (from August 2005, but apparently word kept spreading)
• the Writely acquisition (now part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets)

It wasn't all fun, though; there was the time the blog disappeared. (Of course, that was before the recent Blogger revamp.) But even if real-time, all-too-human goof-ups make it a bit harrowing on occasion, the fact is a company blog is the fastest way to reach out. So we hope you continue to enjoy the rich stew we aim to serve. And before long, perhaps you can begin leaving comments directly. We're working on that. Meanwhile, our very best for a satisfying 2007 to you and yours.

Update: Clarified the fact that the number of posts increased by 100 over a year.

What Is The Definition Of A Blog?

Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad - 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog. Just one accidental deletion and a couple of hacks added a bit of spice and drama.

But today bloggers are starting to ask if the Official Google Blog is even an actual blog. The reason? It doesn’t allow readers to leave comments. The Official Google blog does list links to other sites referencing any given post (a sort of trackback), but that’s it. The conversation ends there.

Yahoo, in contrast, does allow reader comments on their official blogs. At times it has been painful for them, but I believe having this direct user feedback mechanism is helping them make better products.

Other prominent bloggers have removed comments, too. Seth Godin, no. 19 on the Technorati list, rarely allows comment on his blog. He says that comments affect what he writes, and “So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.”

The current definitions of “blog” in most dictionaries don’t mention reader comments at all when defining the term. Wikipedia says only that “the ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.” According to these sources, the minimum requirement for a web site to be a blog is that it have content, and that it be sorted in reverse chronological order.

I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume. We’ve allowed comments here on TechCrunch since it started. At times, user comments can be painful to deal with. But they also keep the writer honest, and make the content vastly more interesting.

Should the definitions of “blog” be revised to exclude journals that do not allow reader comments? Yeah, absolutely. And Google may think so, too. At the end of their post, they write “And before long, perhaps you can begin leaving comments directly. We’re working on that.”