Times Online - Google today underscored its designs on the web 2.0 market by buying JotSpot, a company that specialises in technology for building wikis, or collaborative web pages.

Wikis, most well known from Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia "that anyone can edit", have been flagged as a key means of bringing workers and consumers together online.

The acquisition of the three-year-old Californian group JotSpot is the latest in a growing string by Google.

The leader in internet search recently bought YouTube, the video-sharing website, for $1.65 billion its largest deal yet. Other recent buys have included Writely, the web-based word processor flagged as a competitor to Microsoft's market-leading word.

JotSpot's products, which include an online spreedsheet system, could further bulk up Google's portfolio as it seeks to ramp up pressure on Google. In return, JotSpot, which already has several business customers, will gain access to Google's massive data centres, or "server farms".

Joe Kraus, JotSpot co-founder and chief executive officer, said in his blog today: "We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online."

No financial details of the JotSpot deal were disclosed.