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 that Pyra charged for to be 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 including CSS-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, as well including some new features.

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

As of May 2007, Blogger has completely moved over to Google operated servers.

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. 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 completed 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.

Criticisms

In order to upgrade to the new Blogger service (which has new features and more reliability), a user would have to create a Google Account.

There is also a petition to change the abandoned blog policy, which does not allow blogspot.com addresses to expire, preventing new users from taking abandoned addresses. Even though Blogger is owned by Google, which is primarily a search engine, the contents of the blogs are mostly not indexed by the main search engine, but only by the more specialized "Blog Search" feature.