A View on View :: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

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Mark Evans

the blog - examines the world of telecom and technology from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

the person - lives in Toronto, CA with his wife and three children, and works as director of community with PlanetEye Inc.

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Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Mark Evans on Thu 08 Jun 2006 12:39 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Amid all the chat about whether Google Spreadsheets is another part of Google's strategy to take on Microsoft, it got me thinking about why Google has given so little love to Blogger.com. The blogosphere is exploding with 75,000 new blogs created a day yet Google has really done nothing of significance since buying Blogger.com (Pyra) in 2003. Sure, there have been some improvements but Blogger.com is still more known as the tool of choice for sploggers than a top-notch blogging platform. Google has a so much money and an army of programmers that improving Blogger would seem like a pretty straightforward assignment. They could easily implement a whole bunch of new features (trackbacks would be a good start) and maybe introduce a premium version that includes more bells and whistles. While blogging is becoming more popular, the competitive landscape is still wide open. The top players (Wordpress, Six Apart, Blogware) are small and battling away to build a critical mass of users - and it's seen as big news when Six Part raised a whopping $12-million. Given it's still early days, you figure Google would be smart enough to aggressively jump-start its blog platform strategy rather than "fooling around" with me-too services such as spreadsheets, databases and notepads. Maybe we can't grasp Sergey and Larry's master plan (if, in fact, they have one) but giving Blogger.com some more love seems like a no-brainer.

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Comments

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Dan Sinai on Thu 08 Jun 2006 01:41 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Mark....you are absolutely right. I use Blogger right now and can't believe how limited it is to use. With Google's programming power behind it you would think that there would be more templates, an easier way to show comments on the main web site....etc, etc. Mind you wordpress is not much better....it is still early days in the web 2.0 world - we can only hope that the software catches up to the passion

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by michael collins on Thu 08 Jun 2006 02:52 PM EDT | Permanent Link

This past weekend i moved my blog to wordpress from blogger. (i didn't even know the google thing. yes i've been living under a rock) So far i've found word press easier to use than blogger - for example you can add tags really easily.

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Randy Charles Morin on Thu 08 Jun 2006 03:37 PM EDT | Permanent Link

As usual, I'm here to disagree. Blogger is actually the best blogging platform on the market. The problem is that Blogspot was so overwhelmed with splogs that it became a joke to call almost any blogspot blog a splog. In fact, IceRocket specifically rejected all new blogspot blogs as a measure to contain splogs. I myself, have added the keyword blogspot to my spam filter. The second problem was that Blogger blogs did not support RSS, but rather Atom. This is a marketing problem. People were scared away because they wanted RSS and didn't know that Atom was a worthy replacement.

These two things have changed in the last few weeks. I'm seeing very few Blogspot splogs these days and Blogger recently added support for RSS.

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Ben Yoskovitz on Thu 08 Jun 2006 03:54 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Just yesterday I commented on the Blogger thing as well - glad to see more people doing so.

http://www.igotnewsforyou.com/blog/2006/06/why-doesnt-google-invest-more-in.html

And others are commenting too: http://mcbsconsulting.blogspot.com/2006/06/more-blogger-problems.html

It strikes me as odd that Google doesn't invest in Blogger when to me it seems like it could be more a part of their core strategy (search / ads) than the other things they're doing. And people have been making noise for awhile, so either we're all loopy or Google knows something we don't. I'd vote with the people myself.

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Tony Tarle on Mon 12 Jun 2006 09:23 AM EDT | Permanent Link

kids - maybe they're just hanging back and waiting... letting the critical mass build before pulling the towel out of the ring, squeezing it out and then throwing it back in.

google does have a lot going on - true - but one thing they do not do is move swiftly. small incremental changes to their online products is the way they typcally operate, and i think that's what you're seeing here.

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Grant W Laird Jr on Tue 13 Jun 2006 12:13 AM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

If blogger.com and wordpress isn't best blog - then which blog program is best right now?

Re: Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Mark Evans on Sat 17 Jun 2006 08:53 AM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

don't get me wrong, i like wordpress and blogware among all the blogging platforms i've tried. they're far from perfect but it's still early days.

mark

Re: Why Does Blogger.com Suck?

by Anonymous on Tue 11 Jul 2006 06:44 AM EDT | Permanent Link

www.bloxster.net is much better service to get a free blog from then blogger. There is always something wrong at blogger. My free weblog from bloxster is never down and has lots of cool features.

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\n"; #File retrieval failed - exiting function pass back old values. return $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); } #TODO - Replace with file retrieval $ad_params = $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); $new_ad_params = $this->_newRowPosition($ad_params); #TODO - Add SlidingExpiration for REFRESH Dates that dont change # Example: REFRESH DATE permanently affixed to 2 days prior, every 30sec refresh will attempt a new page download # Temp Solution is to UPDATE FILE_DATE with AD_ROTATE_DATE $new_ad_params["AD_FILEDATE"] = $new_ad_params["AD_ROTATEDATE"]; #echo "Writing new ad
\n"; $this->_updateAdFileParameters($AdFilePath, $new_ad_params); #echo "Returning updated parameters
\n"; return $new_ad_params; } } /** BEGIN Backwards Compatibility Routines */ if (! function_exists('array_combine')) { function array_combine($keys, $values) { foreach($keys as $key) $out[$key] = array_shift($values); return $out; } } if (!function_exists('fputcsv')) { function fputcsv($filePointer, $dataArray, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { // Write a line to a file // $filePointer = the file resource to write to // $dataArray = the data to write out // $delimeter = the field separator // Build the string $string = ""; // No leading delimiter $writeDelimiter = FALSE; foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) { // Replaces a double quote with two double quotes $dataElement=str_replace("\"", "\"\"", $dataElement); // Adds a delimiter before each field (except the first) if($writeDelimiter) $string .= $delimiter; // Encloses each field with $enclosure and adds it to the string $string .= $enclosure . $dataElement . $enclosure; // Delimiters are used every time except the first. $writeDelimiter = TRUE; } // end foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) // Append new line $string .= "\n"; // Write the string to the file return fwrite($filePointer,$string); } } if (!function_exists('fgetcsv')) { #TODO - Remove or ??? #Originally built to handle PHP4 style of fgetcsv $CSVstruct = array('Sep' => ','); function fgetcsv($handle, $length=1024, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { $rows = ParseCSVStream(fgets($handle),"\n",false); return $rows[0]; } } // append a CSV row containing data converted from source array $data. Actual conversion is done by ExCSVRowWalker() function AppendCSVRow($data) { global $CSVstruct; array_walk($data,'ExCSVRowWalker'.($CSVstruct['OutEOL']=="\n"?'N':'')); $CSVstruct['File'] .= implode($CSVstruct['Sep'],$data).$CSVstruct['OutEOL']; } // returns an array of rows (each row being an array of columns) with parsed data. Returns false when conversion fails. Auto-detects Win/Mac/*nix newline characters, which are converted all to the sequence specified (defaults to $CSVstruct['OutEOL']) for your convenience. function ParseCSVStream($data, $newline="\n", $associative=true) { global $CSVstruct; $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\r","\n",str_replace("\r\n","\n",$data)); if ($newline!="\n") $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\n",$newline,$CSVstruct['File']); $CSVstruct['OutEOL'] = $newline; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = 0; $CSVstruct['Error'] = false; $CSVstruct['EOF'] = false; $res = array(); if ($associative) { $titles = ParseCSVRow(); while (($row = ParseCSVRow())!==false) { $newa = array(); //possible optimization: might use array_combine() - requires PHP 5 for ($col = 0; $col0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',str_replace($CSVstruct['OutEOL'],"\n",$item)).'"'; } function ExCSVRowWalkerN(&$item) { if (!is_numeric($item)&&(strlen($item)>0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',$item).'"'; } // read next line from buffer. function RowInput() { global $CSVstruct; if ($CSVstruct['EOF']) { return ""; } else { $pos = strpos($CSVstruct['File'], $CSVstruct['OutEOL'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); if ($pos===false) { $CSVstruct['EOF'] = true; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); } else { $pos1 = $CSVstruct['Seek']; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = $pos+1; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$pos1,$pos-$pos1); }; }; } /** Initialize ad_network variable */ $ad_logic = new ad_logic($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); $ad_network = $ad_logic->ad_network($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); ?>