History

Blogger (formerly Blogspot until 2006) is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. The service itself is located at www.blogger.com

 

, and blogs that do not publish to their own websites are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com.

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 August 14, 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 temporarily blocked access to Blogger.^{[1][verification needed]}

Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007.^{[2][dated info]}

 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.^[3]
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.
In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft,^[4] new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog

 

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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^[update], 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.^[5] However, Microsoft Office 2007 adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger.

• Blogger supports Google's AdSense service as a 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.
• Google Docs has direct publishing integration to Blogger
• Windows Live Writer, a standalone app of the Windows Live suite, publishes directly to Blogger.