Last month, people talked and wrote much more than usual about Blogger, Google’s blogging platform. The reason for this was not so affirmative for Google. The site was inaccessible for 24 hours. Users have not been able to manage their blogs. Latest blog articles, which were created just before the incident, simply disappeared. The confusion lasted relatively short, but enough that many users (including the author of these lines) may have thought “perhaps it is time to move to WordPress…”
Soon after that on various IT blogs headlines like Google’s Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy (article from the pen of the Microsoft team) have appeared. Different articles shared the skepticism regarding the functionality of other Google products, such as Chrome OS, which is fully based on the “cloud”. They threw a shadow on the announced ChromeBook. A one day issue of Blogger was marked as the beginning of the end of the Google era.
At the same time, informations about an insidious campaign launched by Facebook leaked to the public. Prominent IT bloggers were engaged in order to show Google in an unfavorable light. Although Facebook targets the problem of user privacy (this is quite a painful issue for both companies), from a similar perspective with a negative connotation, the discussion focussed on Blogger.
What actually happened was not a great debacle at all. In last few years, similar things have happened to almost all of the major blogging platforms. Blogger appeared to be the most reliable all the time. The only alternative which can be argued that is better than Blogger is WordPress – with a paid hosting (but, depending on the hosting providers, this solution can range from very good, to even much worse than those offered by free platforms such as Blogger).
Besides being free and, therefore, available to everyone, Blogger offers its users a range of wonderful features. Even people without technical knowledge can design their own blogs using the Template Designer. Real designers can modify or write a brand new CSS and HTML code. Also, on the Internet you can find thousands of themes, originally made for WordPress, that was adapted for Blogger. When it comes to gadgets – there is no limit: you can choose among the myriad of existing and – if you know how and want to – you can make your own.
A single blog can have up to 100 authors. They can not register themselves, blog admin must send them invitations.
Blogger also supports PPC ads (Google AdSense, etc.). For comparison, if you have a free hosted blog on WordPress, it will not be allowed. Some other platforms – LiveJournal, MySpace etc – put their own ads in user’s blogs!
Blogger announced many innovations this year. Basically it is a modernization of the platform, which will now support CSS3, HTML5, AJAX… The result, I believe, will not only reach the level at which is currently WordPress. Blogger will, in some ways, become more modern than others. We can already see a hint of the future appearance of blogs. Dynamic Views are enabled: select any blog on Blogger, add “/view” in the URL and take a look.
I use Blogger for two years and I am perfectly satisfied. This was the first time that I could not publish an article. One single day. I think that this is not a sufficient reason for migration. What do you think?
