Blogger: The Ins and Outs

Blogging is all the rage nowadays. It is a fun and inexpensive way to make your voice heard on the Internet. Through blogging you can make your daily thoughts (intimate or not) publicly known – and with a greater audience. This makes the service great for diary keeping (if making a public diary is your cup of tea), marketing (blogging is a great way to perform marketing – more of that later), and information sharing and updating.

Why Blog?
Blogging is a way of life. It is probably one of the most enabling forces of technology to hit the Internet in the last few years. Curiously, it has allowed a greater involvement of people with technology and information. The great thing about blogging is that it is easy to learn and easy to get into – especially with a blogging service like Blogger.

Blogs are, in a technical sense, content management software that helps you effectively organize and catalog a chronological journal of information that is posted regularly. It is a lot more effective than static websites that, however well managed, cannot exude a sense of intimacy, and urgency as a blog. In some sense, a blog can be likened to a diary, which for many people, especially those in the online world, can be much more interesting than a regular newspaper.

Blogger Comes into the Picture
Blogger is a free service offered by Google. Pyra studios first developed it with a total workforce of about three people. It achieved great success during the dot com boom and subsequently had to manage a disappointing decline during the dot com bust.

After years of treading water, piece by piece Pyra studios was able to keep the members of the already formidable Blogger community happy. In time, Blogger boasted of a community of 100,000 members. In 2002, Google stepped in to the picture and purchased Blogger. Pyra continued to exist as an entity as a department within the Google family.

Why Blogger?
Why choose Blogger? There are hundreds of reasons. Here are a few that will at the same time, give us a better picture of Blogger as a blog service.

1. It is Free. You can sign up for Blogger for free. You can either sign up as a new user or you can use your Gmail account to sign up for Blogger. There are no start up fees, and no recurring fees. It is pretty much like the free Google service Gmail. The ads are minimal and do not present themselves as a hindrance to enjoying the service. Also, just because it is free doesn’t mean that it has fewer features – actually, it is quire the contrary.

2. Fully Featured. The great thing about Blogger is that it provides most of the features that even subscription blogging sites do not offer. The Blogger panel offers a very attractive interface with other attractive templates to choose from. You can avail of standard features like in most blogs. Post entries, insert pictures, modify your interface using HTML, insert useful utilities (like visitor counter, etc.), and generally enjoy a robust and complete blogging package.

3. Easy Indexing. The Blogger community is easily searchable. You can find blogs related to pretty much any hobby or interest you have. Your blog is also automatically submitted to this list and made available for searching. Also, the interface is easy to understand and modify. It also offers suggestions on other great blogs to visit. In effect, it does a little advertising on your behalf since it could very well recommend your blog to others browsing for blogs to subscribe to.

4. Business Advantages. The great thing about Blogger is that it is easy to insert Adsense ads and other advertisements on your page. You also get your own blogspot URL to make your site easily accessible by other people. Blogs are a great way to market any product or service. This is because it is an intimate, information filled journal that allows for easy commenting and feedback.
This intimate approach to marketing is wildly successful and has led many large companies to employ blogs in their business strategies. Readers of blogs love the fact that the entries are regular and informative. Also they love the fact that they are intimate and give the impression of a friend talking about something. Readers truly respond to this type of marketing.