a) Some things I'd do if I owned a major search engine and had recently acquired a major blogging system:
1. Collect the referral logs - see which items are the most popular and where visitors arrive from.
2. Create a TrackBack or notification URL that can be pinged whenever a new post is made using a different system.
3. Integrate all posts into the main search engine straight after posting.
4. Add a 'weblogs' tab to the search pages.
5. Use the posting date to sort by time, as well as by relevance.
6. Use this date sorting to sell RSS feeds of new posts matching keywords.
7. Use text analysis to group posts by subject and present them on one page, as with the current news pages.
...
b) An interpretation of Kevin Marks' analysis of Clay Shirky's essay on inequality in weblogs:
According to recent measurements, there are lots of little weblogs, not so many little newspapers, and hardly any little films. This is due to the cost of publishing.
Most of the weblogs have a similar number of outgoing links, but some have far more incoming links (the few big weblogs).
This is a power law, and has surprised the world.