This is not to deny the significance of blogging, or the value that comes from having the unmediated opinions and experiences of millions of people available online.
Blogging left the geeks behind long ago, and the wide availability of easy to use tools like Blogger, Movable Type and Grey Matter has allowed anyone with an interest and some time to create their own online journal.
I just do not subscribe to the view that this challenges 'proper' journalism, even if it does mean that sloppy reporting and analysis based on incorrect assertions are more likely to be challenged by the online community.
What then of Blogger and Google?
Now that some of the dust has settled it is clear that nobody knows what is going to happen next.
Not even, it seems, Evan Williams himself since he admitted that just because he had negotiated the sale to Google "that doesn't mean I know much. For example, about the question: What happens now?"
Some think that Google was simply helping out a fellow innovator that had fallen on hard times. Others see it as the start of an attempt by this most successful of search engines to own the 'blogosphere', all the world's blogs.
Another theory has it that Google will use the content from the blogs it now owns to fine tune its news service by using the bloggers as an early warning system on breaking stories.
Internet entrepreneur and blogger Anil Dash believes it is Google's first mistake, the start of a strategy to turn the search engine into a portal which is doomed to failure.
And the paranoid fringe think that it is just another takeover from a secretive, hyper-competitive company with no respect for the personal privacy of its users.
I think this last group may actually have a point.
Tracking users
Google is a privately-owned US company that has a policy of collecting as much information as possible about everyone who uses its search tool.
It will store your computer's IP address, the time/date, your browser details and the item you search for.
It sets a tracking cookie on your computer that does not expire until 2038.
This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years.
Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is.
It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes.
And the much-loved Google toolbar tells Google about every web page you look at.
Yet it so dominates the search engine market that no website can afford to ignore it, and it indexes so much of the web that few users think of using another.
The way it ranks pages is a commercial secret, outside any external supervision or control.
If Google decides it does not like you then you can be dropped from the index.
Time for Ofsearch?
Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is - a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest.
The argument about keeping away from regulating the internet and the web has always been that the technology is not mature enough or important enough to merit government interference.
Surely, with more than half of UK adults using the net we have reached the point where this argument no longer applies.
A government serious about ensuring that the net benefits society as a whole could start by investigating Google and considering whether we should create Ofsearch, the Office of Search Engines.
