Remember Blogger? Of course you do. But do you still use it, or did you start using WordPress or Tumblr years ago?
Blogger is one of the oldest names on the blogging block, but hasn’t had a lot of love from its owners for a long time. Aside from a gorgeous and easy-to-use template design tool launched last year, its user interface languished in a bygone era of the web, and just didn’t come close to the modern stylings of more recent competitors. Blogger just looked out-dated.
That’s about to change. The new Blogger is bang-up-to-date and looks much more like many of the other web services Google has built over the years.
Blogger was co-founded by a young man called Evan Williams. Back when blogging was new and exciting, Blogger was briefly the coolest thing around. It just kept growing, and got sold to Google. (Evan went to to found a tiny startup called Odeo, and one of Odeo’s side-projects turned into something called Twitter, but that’s another story.) Then the new young upstarts like Moveable Type and WordPress came along, and Blogger was no longer the hot blogging ticket.
Now Blogger claims 400 million active readers, and 5,000 novels worth of new words a day. That’s a lot of content.
If you were Google, wouldn’t you want to be doing something with all that content, and giving the people who write it better ways of doing so? Of course you would. Suddenly, Blogger has regained its cool, and bloggers everywhere have something to celebrate.