Blogger for You

I find it ironic that MySpace became so popular and ushered in the age of social networking when sites like Blogger were already out there for people to write about their day, share their music and show friends their images. Before "social networking" bloggers could follow other bloggers by clicking "follow" and leave comments without a wall or a page.

Actually, the more I play around with Blogger, with customization, HTML, embedding videos and slideshows, the more I realize MySpace held no features Blogger didn't already have, they just hit a target market (musicians, bands and entertainers) and made getting your stuff out there much easier than the idea of blogging. After all, blogging is something internet-nerds do, not something hip young people do, right?

Unless, of course, you consider Facebook status updates as blogs (which they are), Twitter's 140 character "What I'm doing now" as blogs (which they are and is why Twitter is called a micro-blogging site) and Tumblr are all blogs without being called blogs. Even LinkedIN's updates are small blogs.

We blog every day, and yet people still don't blog. Wordpress came in and made customization easy, just like MySpace did, and nearly every website out there has some sort of blogging ability for it's users. Heck, the Huffington Post is nothing but a  giant blog.

There are no restrictions with Blogger. You can write 10,000 words, or 100; you can create text or add images and videos; the Blogger user can blog about her day, keep track of recipes or use it as a tool for novel writing.

I will admit, though, Blogger does need to be more user-friendly. Adjusting the templates, using their new Dynamic Views and whatnot are easy enough, but HTML, CSS... some of us aren't programmers, we just want a nice WYSIWYG interface. Uploading a picture to Blogger is very simple. Uploading a handful or an album's worth of pictures to Blogger, also easy. However, creating a table or collage of pictures (whether from an album or independent images) on Blogger is extraordinarily difficult for consumer-grade users. For example, sometimes I want to line three or four images up side-by-side instead of one of top of the other, but Blogger doesn't have that as a native easy to find feature. Instead you need to get into HTML or CSS and create tables.

However, Blogger is powered by some of the smartest people on the planet. No, not NASA -- Google, is totally free, has tremendous uptime and if you really want to, you can monetize Blogger and make a little cash on the side either with sponsored ads or Google's adsense.

And if you're a prolific Google+ user, you can now plus-tag other G+ users in your Blog posts. That on top of images, videos, podcasts, customization, networking and everything else Google for the low-low price of free. Isn't that awesome?