How Google Leeches from the Long Tail in the Centripetal Web

For four years, I'd been a happy user of Bloglines, an RSS feed service owned by Ask.com since 2005. Then a funny thing happened a month or so ago.

Feeds to my Wall Street Journal subscription, the New York Times, Reuters and several other sites I troll daily to support my coverage became inaccessible.

My complaint e-mail to Bloglines' support team went unanswered. Did someone at Ask.com lay off the Bloglines team and forget to tell us? I spent a few days manually going to the absent sites, hoping the power would come back on for my missing feeds. No such luck.

So, around the time September slid into October, I turned to Google Reader, and even though Bloglines allegedly has remedied its balky ways, I haven't looked back.

In fact, I found myself wondering why I hadn't switched to Google Reader sooner. I use Google for general search and blog search, and I use Google's Gmail. I spend a portion of my work day reading Google's blogs for news bits. Wouldn't it make sense to go whole hog with Google for the Web services I need? I'll come back to that idea.

Earlier this week, I read a post on Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog that perfectly summed up my position. It's called "The Centripetal Web," and it's a must-read.

Carr noted that while the majority of us a few years ago stumbled upon new sites via Yahoo or AltaVista, our laziness increased. We became Web congregators instead of Web surfers, hewing to a few sites whose popularity was enhanced by search algorithms.

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