The San Francisco Chronicle figuratively cocked its head and pricked up its ears in a vain attempt to interpret what Google is up to with its Orkut social networking site. Google recently hired some journalists and photographers to start adding pop-oriented content to the site, seemingly in an attempt to gin up additional interest in visiting Orkut and staying longer. In its trawling of various online experts, the Chronicle comes up empty, as Google's few attempts at content creation seem to be completely unrelated. The major daily indicated that "major publications needn't worry about readers being siphoned off by Google's writerly ambitions," as the Orkut content uses a voice and style "common to Web journals, otherwise known as blogs."

The Google content creation efforts may indeed be narrow and unrelated exploitations of individual opportunities. On the other hand, this could be a beta test of blog-like voice added to aggregated news content that could envelop and compete with local newspapers - themselves typically news aggregators for the most part - further eating into the local advertising revenues that newspapers stand the most to lose.