Blogger (service)

Blogger is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003

History
On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. 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 (for which Pyra had charged) to become free. About a year later, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.

In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; 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 such as web standards-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email.

On 14 August 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed "Invader", alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers and included some new features.

In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta.

By May 2007, Blogger had completely moved over to Google operated servers.

In October 2008 Turkey blocked access to Blogger.

Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007

Redesign
As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Account were migrated to Google servers. Blogger claims that the service is now more reliable because of 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. As of January 2007, Google says "Blogger for Word is not currently compatible with the new version of Blogger", and they state no decision has been made about supporting it with the new Blogger. However, Microsoft Office 2007 adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger.

Blogger supports Google's AdSense service as a simple way of generating revenue from running a blog.

Blogger offers multiple author support, making it possible to establish group blogs.

Blogger offers a template editing feature, which allows users to customize the Blogger template.

Windows Live Writer, a standalone app of the Windows Live suite, publishes directly to Blogger.