Blogger (service)

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This article is about the blogging service. For a person who maintains a blog, see Blogger.

Blogger is a weblog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, who were bought by Google in 2003.

History

Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in August 1999. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format.

In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features that Pyra charged for to be free. About a year later, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.

Google purchased Picasa in 2004; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello, into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by e-mail.

On 14 August 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed Invader, alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers, as well including some new features. In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta.

 

Features

Blogs can either be hosted internally by Blogger (using blogspot.com addresses), or on the users own server (through FTP or SFTP).

Redesign

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Account are located on Google servers. The service is now claimed to be more reliable, due to the quality of the servers.

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

Integration

• The Google Toolbar has a feature called "BlogThis!" which allows toolbar users with Blogger accounts to post links directly to their blogs.
• "Blogger for Word" is a free add-in for Microsoft Word. This add-in allows users to save a Microsoft Word Document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline.
• Blogger supports Google's AdSense service as a simple way of generating revenue from running a blog.

Problems

The Blogger service often has problems of various kinds. These problems can last just minutes or hours/days. The new term, 'bloggered', can now applied in situations where Blogger suddenly and inexplicably goes down, causing readers to be unable to read the affected blog, preventing the blog author(s) from posting/updating posts, or myriad other potential difficulties. For instance, a blog that goes down due to problems with Blogger, the author of that blog may state "I have been bloggered." (though, 'bloggered' should probably be capitalized, since being 'bloggered' refers specifically to the Blogger service, not other blog services).

See also

• List of Google services and tools
• Blogger banned in Pakistan
• Kareem Amer, an Egyptian blogger twice arrested by state security for anti-Islam posts on Blogger

External links

• Blogger website
• Official blogger status
• Typical Blogger Site
• 2005 Interviews with Pyra Lab cofounders:
  • Meg Hourihan interview (in MP3 format), summarized here, from IT Conversations
  • Evan Williams interview (in MP3 format), summarized here, from Venture Voice
• Summary of 2004 redesign, from the Blogger website