Here’s a familiar scenario: You’ve become bored with the current blogging platform you’re on or it decides to shut down like Posterous did after Twitter acquired it. What do you do with all of your posts? Sure, you could hop from one platform to the other, but you need a safe and trustworthy place to store all of your important thoughts. I spoke with Automattic’s Matt… → Read More
If you’re using Blogger for your daily personal or business writings, you might be happy to know that it has gotten a bit more of the Google+ social treatment. You can now mention anyone on Google+ within your post, and they’ll see it as a notification. It’s a good way to get people’s attention, also a good way to provide context to your content. We haven’t heard much about Google’s blogging… → Read More
Google’s blogging service Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a trillion words in total) to date, writes product manager Chang Kim on the Blogger Buzz blog.
Those blog posts have been read by 400 million readers across the globe, Kim adds. And according to the video below, 75 percent of traffic comes from outside the United States (the service is available in… → Read More
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.
Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in… → Read More
Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).
Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is available for all non-private Blogger blogs. The only catch is you’ll only see the new ‘Stats’ tab when you go to draft.blogger.com.
On the new Stats page, you’ll see a tab that says ‘Now’, which… → Read More
At least 18 years old? Own a Windows PC? Have 60 minutes to spare?
Google wants you to test usability of its Blogger service on your own computer, and is prepared to give you $75 in American Express gift checks if you participate in a screen sharing session and a phone call with some of their people. Also, you must allow them to record audio or video of said session. We think you can keep your… → Read More
We got a tip about a video from the same people who made us – and subsequently, you – aware of Biz Stone‘s 2006 video-recorded attempt to explain ‘Twttr’ when the service that became Twitter was still in diapers.
This time, it’s Twitter’s other co-founder, Evan Williams, who appears in a video with developer Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan, Alberto González and some birds, recorded way back when. → Read More
Buma/Stemra, a Dutch collective rights society that represents the interests of copyright holders (some 19,000 composers, authors and publishers), is the topic of the day in the Dutch blogosphere and beyond. The association has managed to wield itself into the eye of the storm because of the introduction of new, exorbitantly high digital music licensing fees, and its stated willingness to fine… → Read More
Google’s Blogger Buzz blog may not the best of places to get hit by spam. And we’re not talking comment spam, we’re talking post spam, as you can tell from the screenshot above.
Unless it wasn’t actually the blogging equivalent of junk mail but just some overanxious Googler who was so thrilled with some new feature they’re adding to the free blogging service that he/she resorted to gobbledygook… → Read More
What were you doing in 1999? Maybe you were following the Kosovo War. Maybe you were starting to use Napster. Maybe you were entering your senior year of high school (I was). Or maybe you started blogging. After all, on August 23, 1999, Pyra Labs launched its Blogger product, which would go on to become the biggest blogging platform in the world.
Yes, on Sunday, Blogger turns 10 years old. And to… → Read More
Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later… → Read More
Google’s blog publishing platform, Blogger, is bringing its Custom Search Box gadget out of its beta version, also known as Blogger in Draft. The search gadget a blog’s readers search posts, web pages linked from the blog, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list.
Google initially launched the gadget on its Blogger in Draft platform, which offers users a version of… → Read More
Google has integrated Friend Connect with its weblog publishing service Blogger. Essentially, this enables people to start following (i.e. subscribing to) blogs using their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts and turns Blogger more into a social network than a straightforward blog publishing service.
Blogs that you follow will be listed in your Blogger profile and the integration will also… → Read More
Canadian model Liskula Cohen has sued Google for a number of snarky remarks that were made by a blogger using the company’s Blogger service. The NY Daily News reports that the former Vogue cover girl has been called ‘skanky’ and ‘an old hag’ by an anonymous blogger on a website called Skanks in NYC (could be deemed NSFW).
The defamation suit, filed in Manhattan, seeks a court order compelling… → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). … → Read More
Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.
By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger… → Read More
In Febuary of this year Google re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Google had acquired Jotspot some 16 months earlier, during which time Jot was only available to existing customers and closed to new signups. What happen during those 16 months and why did the process of integrating with Google take so long? Looking through the list of companies that Google has acquired, Jotspot would be… → Read More
Google has announced that Blogger will now be officially available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, bringing the number of languages supported by Blogger to 40. More significantly, Blogger now supports right to left writing as well for Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. Blogs in Arabic and Persian have been hosted by Blogger from its pre-Google days, so it’s surprising that the service is only now… → Read More
After testing OpenID’s as logins to Google’s Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself. The news confirms TechCrunch UK’s story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train. Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option… → Read More
Google’s Blogger hosted blogging service has suffered a major outage this afternoon (PST) with Spammers bloggers flooding forums to complain. Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code “bX-uxu3fu,” and were unable to read their blogs, or log in to the backend. No further details are available as Blogger employees have not… → Read More
Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments. The new service will allow anyone with an OpenID account, including LiveJournal and TypeKey services to log in and validate a comment on blogs running under the Blogger in Draft service. Google notes that the feature is a… → Read More
Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is: Here are my takeaways. MySpace is… → Read More
FacebookSecrets, the blog that posted the accidentally released source code for the Facebook main index page, has been taken down. The blog was hosted on the Google-owned Blogger blog network and was removed pursuant to a DMCA take down notice from Facebook. A new blog (also on Blogger) has gone up that chronicles the back and forth between Google and the author (well, it’s one way… → Read More
Pardon me, but didn’t LG just strike a huge deal with Yahoo! recently? I suppose you shouldn’t even bother choosing sides when you can have the best of both worlds. LG has announced that it will be including some of Google’s mobile apps on future phones, which will include Gmail, Mobile Maps, Search, and Blogger. Ten of these new “Google-fied” phones will drop this… → Read More
The new Blogger beta product, open to a limited number of users in August, is now live for all users. The key changes include the addition of tags, which Google has always called “labels,” and an option to create a private blog. You can also now sign into your blogger account using your Google credentials, and Google has made editing the template and posts significantly more user… → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/or sues bloggers. That's the first rule of blogging. Therefore, it's strange that the Masked Blogger, apparently a UK-based Apple employee, decided to create a tell-all — OK, fairly tame and boot-licking — expose of the dirty laundry sequestered in the back rooms of Cupertino's golden children. Folks a… → Read More
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Google Launches Google+ Commenting System For Blogger, Coming To The Rest Of The Web Soon?
Google today announced that bloggers on its Blogger publishing platform can now enable a new Google+-powered commenting system for their sites. This means Blogger users can now use Google+ as a commenting platform for their blogs and comments from Google+ will automatically appear on their blogs, too. Google has already enabled this new system on all of its official blogs. This new commenting… → Read More