OPEN

Google has announced that it has bought a wiki service JotSpot.

Excellent news for users of the ever-widening array of personal productivity and web services applications from Google.

: : Steve Rubel wonders if people will want ads inside their web apps. Here’s the answer: of Gmail, Writely, Spreadsheets, Calendar and I can’t recall off the top of my head which of them do or don’t have ads.

OK, only Gmail does – I can’t recall ever being irritated by ads on that service. If you choose to look at them the contextualisation is a little dodgy sometimes, but basically Google knows how to serve ads without getting on your nerves. That’s worth almost as much as the AdSense technology itself – and suggests to me that they’ll have no problem monetising their extra “inventory”.

Also there’s more to it than creating more potential ad space – buying a wiki service and existing community keeps them even closer to another developing field of social media. And search engines love social media – all those insights into behaviours, all those “signs of quality” beloved by Google engineers in the form of links, conversations and traffic.