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 50 languages).
Now the product is getting an overhaul, the biggest change being a more modern user interface for both the editor and the dashboard (fi-na-lly), built with Google Web Toolkit. → 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 both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. → 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 gives Blogger users an almost real-time overview of which articles are most popular right now, and where those visitors are coming from (both in terms of source and geographical location). → 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 clothes on. → 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 bloggers up to €21,6 (roughly $31.8) per music video they dare embed on their websites or blogs.
Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here). → 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 speak out of sheer excitement. Or maybe this person was still a bit tipsy from the 10-year anniversary get-together. → 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 celebrate, the Blogger team (which is now a part of Google following a 2003 acquisition) is promising a bunch of gifts to users in the form of new features. Without naming anything specifically, Blogger points to this list as a good reference point for some of what they’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. Of note on that list are a better commenting system and WordPress-style pages (About page, etc). → 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, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.
Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch. → 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 Blogger where Google tests out features and new interfaces. Google says it has upgraded the search gadget to provide simpler defaults as well as the ability for the box to integrate with the aesthetics and color of your blog. The Search Box gadget uses AJAX Search APIs to power the feature and also automatically updates the custom linked search engine when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists. → 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 leverage existing relationships, meaning you’ll be able to quickly see if your friends are also following those blogs. → 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 Google and its Blogger service to identify the anonymous blogger. Google declined to discuss any specifics, only responding to the claim by saying they sympathize with victims of cyberbullying but “take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order”, so we’ll leave you with a quote from Cohen instead:
“I’m tall, I’m blond, I’ve been modeling for many years, and people get jealous,” she said. “If I had to deal with everyone who is jealous, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”
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). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.
ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well. Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. → 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 dashboard. → 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 considered lucky as many others have died, stalled or lost out to competitors because of the acquisition process. Blogger was acquired by Google in Febuary of 2003, and at the time it was the leading blog platform by a wide margin. Within a few months, MovableType had taken over the self-hosting market, followed by Typepad and then WordPress and WordPress.com. In the interim Blogger had stalled at Google, with no new feature releases, no improvements and a lack of support. In 2005 Dodgeball was acquired – a potentially early Twitter or cool location based service, and it died inside Google. In Febuary of 2006, MeasureMap, the blog analytics tool, was acquired and never heard from again. GrandCentral went to Google last year, for $45M, and since then the service has been frozen with no new users allowed to signup and sporadic periods of downtime (meaning users cant get any phonecalls, at all). One of the first main challenges for a company that has been acquired by Google is adopting the proprietary technology stack used within the company. Google does use Linux and open source, but their core technologies are all internal to the company. I have heard that it can take a new engineer at Google anywhere from 3-6 months to become accustomed to using these tools and services. The table below sets out the Google stack and the technologies used: Google Technology Stack C++, Java and Python Core libraries and components in C++, web applications in Java (Google Web Toolkit) or Python (not as common) MapReduce Distributed computing library and cluster. Written in C++ can interface in Java or Python Big Table Distributed column-oriented data store with query language. Google FS Large-scale distributed file system. Used for object/file storage Because of the difference in technology, it can take a company anywhere from a year to three or more years to move over to the Google infrastructure and architecture. Blogger was still running their own infrastructure until their new release last year, and they have → 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 officially supporting the languages. The Middle East presents strong growth opportunities for Google and other companies as younger generations embrace the internet. Even in more closed countries such as Iran, blogging has long been popular and Blogger has often been the platform of choice. Bloggers in many Middle Eastern countries blog at their own risk, with sites regularly becoming blocked or as is the case in countries such as Saudi Arabia, bloggers are arrested and jailed. → 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 via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year. → 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 responded to the official Blogger forum at the time of writing with a response. We’ll update the post if we find out more. I did try clicking on a few of the blogs highlighted as being updated from the front page of Blogger, and from five attempts I managed to visit five spam blogs, so at least some of the biggest users of Blogger don’t seem to be affected by this issue Update: reports that most of Blogger is back up from around 6:45pm PST. Still no word as to what went wrong. (via Paris Lemon on Twitter, who’s blog is also down) → 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 test and that they will seek user feedback, but all things being equal this will end up being provided on Blogger itself. The bigger news, particularly for rabid OpenID advocates is a suggestion from Google that they are “working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web,” which sounds a lot like code for Google is looking at turning Blogger logins into OpenID log ins in a similar way that AOL did with its user base. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know who is driving this, and Google even drops a hint in the example link: “http://brad.livejournal.com/”; LiveJournal founder and former SixApart employee Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google in August and is credited as the founder of OpenID. OpenID advocates are passionate about the potential of the idea, but despite the noise and companies such as Digg, Yahoo and even to some extent Microsoft adopting OpenID it has failed to capture the broader public’s imagination. If the 1000 pound Gorilla in the room decides to adopt OpenID across its range of products, presumably with Blogger being only the first step of a broader rollout, OpenID may finally take off outside of the first adopter and tech communities. Thanks to David for the tip → Read More
