History of Blogger

Blogger was first launched on August 23, 1999.  It was created by Pyra Labs. Blogger is one of the earliest blog publishing tools.  It has been credited for helping to popularize the format.   At first Blogger was entirely free and there was no income model.  When Pyra Lab’s money was diminished, the employees worked without pay for weeks, even months.  This caused a lot of employees to leave the company. Evan Williams, who is the co founder of Blogger, ran the company solely by himself after the loss of income.  He then was lucky to seal an investment by Trellix. Soon after, advertising started supporting Blogger, and Blogger Pro emerged.

Pyra Labs was bought out by Google in February of 2003. The acquisition to Google was done subtly.  The acquisition allowed premium features, which were once charged for, to become free.  Then, around a year later, Evan Williams left Google.  In 2004 Google purchased Picasa.  When they did this they incorporated Picasa and its photo sharing utility into Blogger.  This movement brought in more users because it allowed them to post photos to their blogs.  In 2004 Blogger completed a significant redesign.  They added multiple features.  These features included individual archive pages for posts, comments, posting by email, and web templates. On August 14, 2006, Blogger brought forth its latest and more advanced version in beta.  This version’s code name was Invader.  Invader attracted even more users to Google servers and included some new features. However, at the end of 2006 Blogger was removed from beta. By May 2007, Blogger had entirely moved over to Google operated dedicated servers.  Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of the top 50 domains in conditions of numbers of visitors in the year 2007. Blogger has been redesigned multiple times through out its existence.  Its most drastic redesign took place in 2006.  All blogs, which were associated with a user’s Google account, were automatically moved to Google servers.  This made Blogger claim that the service was more reliable due to the quality of the servers provided by Google.  Along with the movement to Google servers, there were new features introduced.  These features included, a drag and drop template-editing interface, label organization, and new web feed options.  In addition the blogs were updated enthusiastically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files. Additional Facts: The Google toolbar has a feature that is called BlogThis.  This tool bar allows users that have blogger accounts to post links directly to their blogs no matter the size. “Blogger for Word” is a completely free add in for Microsoft Word.  This  add in enables users to save a MS word document right onto a Blogger blog.  They can also edit their post any time on and offline.  However, in January 2007, Google stated that Blogger Word is not compatible with the new version of blogger coming out, and they do not know if they will support it in the future.  Blogger is extremely supportive of Google's AdSense service as a means of income from running a blog. Blogger offers multiple author support.  This support makes it possible to set up group blogs. Blogger also offers a template-editing feature that allows users to modify the Blogger template. Windows live Writer, which is a standalone application of the Windows Live suite, publishes straight to Blogger. The only two countries which have sworn off blogger and have blocked it is, Turkey and Pakistan.  The reasons for this have never been explained.  Bloggers main website is www.blogger.com.  The blogs which it host are all from blogspot.com.

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