A blogger (lowercase) also refers to a person who maintains a blog under any blogging service, not necessarily Blogger.

Blogger, a coined word created by Pyra Labs, is a service that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web.

The tool Blogger is a service to make weblog publishing easier. The user does not have to write any code or to worry about installing server software or scripts. But nevertheless the user can influence the design of his blog freely.

Blogger allows for the hosting of the blogs on its own Blogspot or on the server of the blogger's choosing (via FTP or SFTP). While most of the web browsers are supported, Mozilla Firefox is used internally for all Blogger staffs [1]. Blogger advises its users, especially AOL users, to switch to Mozilla Firefox in order to have the best possible experience using Blogger.

History

Launched in August 1999, it is one of the first dedicated blog-publishing tools and is credited for helping popularize the form. More specifically, instead of hand-coding posts in HTML and frequently uploading new posts, the user can make posts to the weblog by submitting a form on the Blogger web site. This is possible with any web browser and the results immediately show up on the site.

Blogger was started by Pyra Labs. In 2003, the search engine company Google Inc. acquired Pyra Labs and in doing so, Blogger. Google provided the resources that Pyra needed. Furthermore, formerly premium features that needed to be paid for were made available for free with Google's help.

Google purchased Picasa (an image software maker) in 2004 and its photo sharing utility Hello, integrating the latter with Blogger, thus allowing users to post photos to their blogs. Thus photoblogging became a reality with the integration of Blogger with Hello.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger relaunched with a redesign in collaboration between web design firms Adaptive Path and Stopdesign , adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by e-mail. [2] [3] [4]

Google would also later launch a section called BlogThis! on their Google toolbar and added a link for non-supported computers to use the BlogThis! tool. The BlogThis tool allowed a pop-up window to open with an immediate form that allowed the user to publish directly through the tool without logging into to Blogger from the central website, and keeping the other websites around them open.

See also

• List of Google tools and services

External links

• Blogger website