Results tagged “blogger”

First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google's venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they'd originally set out to make.

As one of the earliest users of Blogger, I was always amongst the service's biggest fans (and have been duly impressed by the new features introduced on Blogger lately). Pyra went through financial struggles, had a painful breakup of the original team, got back on its feet with a new team, and then finally sold to Google. And all of that happened more than nine years ago. Amazing how time flies!

In the years since, I've either remained or become friends with most of the folks who were involved in Pyra's various incarnations, and so when I started to lament the lack of innovation and evolution in blogging software and platforms in recent years, that early crew came to mind as the first people to talk to about where we should be headed.

Thus, I present a discussion which became wonderfully fruitful, featuring Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch and Matt Haughey. Along with Matt Hamer, they formed the core of the Blogger team at the time I fell in love with it thirteen (!) years ago. I think you'll enjoy their conversation as much as others who've shared a link to it, ranging from Tim O'Reilly to Michael Arrington to Om Malik to Dave Winer.

How do blogs need to evolve?

Add your comments by, you know, blogging about it on your own site.

Related: My skeptical, but not entirely incorrect, post about Google's acquisition of Pyra from 2003. And courtesy of the Web Archive, my info page on Blogger Pro from early 2001, proving what a fanboy I've always been.

• "Two of the most financially successful Web 2.0 personalities ... are rooting for the financial failure of their competitors." Hmm. I tend to root for the success of our company's competitiors, because I want the entire industry to be healthy, I think the competition is good for all of us, and because I actually give a damn about the web. I'm not sure if I believe the sentiment that's quoted above, but I do know there are lots of people who take digs at their competitors or wish them ill. In the long term, this is a self-correcting problem. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

• On a not-entirely-unrelated note, congratulations, Jason. A break is well-deserved, and a lot of what Mena said about Ev applies here as well.

• What's it look like after people have rooted for your failure but you make it work anyway? It looks like a WSJ profile of marca. I remember being in high school and my Morrissey-listening friends would tell me they would hate it if I became successful.

• 
  What was that about successful friends? Dear Flickr team: Did you know the official Justin Timberlake SexyBack Tour Photo Contest happens to run as a Flickr photo group? I'm also pretty entertained by the cover of the new album, FutureSex / LoveSounds, which is pictured here. (See also: my earlier review of SexyBack, the lead single.)

• The other kids aren't listening to Justin Timberlake, they're listening to Kelly Clarkson! So says the wildly erratic Google Music Trends, which relies on the apparently completely unreliable "Now Playing" status of Google Talk to determine song popularity.

• Want to talk to Google Talk users without using Google's system at all? For free? Using open source software? Hmm, that sounds interesting... Act now and we'll throw in a free Jabber server.

• If you're not sick of me yet, pick up this month's Wired. The story's not online yet, but I talk a bit about spam blogs (as mentioned by Steve Rubel) but come off sounding a little half-witted at points. That's okay.

• And finally, some outstanding conversations have started based on my talk at MeshForum a few months ago. Slouching Toward the Era of Quality of Life, What blogspace needs now and Audience and purpose in blogging all delighted me with the great ideas that seemed to come from these bloggers thinking out loud on their sites. I like it when my ideas' competitors succeed.