It's funny, but I have been pondering just what might be going on behind the curtain over at Google with their Blogger team and the platform's future. You've probably seen a number of articles stating that Blogging is Dead or Google will shut down Blogger all together. Not to mention, the number of posts on their internal Blogger Buzz site has dropped from 40+ articles a year in 2011 down to less than 10 a year since. Update December 2018 - Google has no plans to drop Blogger
I really would not pay much attention to rumors like this considering the number of Blogger users in the world. In fact, Blogger is an excellent means for Google to get more people directly connected and to become more integrated into the Google ecosystem with profile information. This is extremely important since people with profiles utilize search giving Google a one-up on what people do online. Also, you may or may not have noticed that all of Google's official blogs are running on Blogger (this is no longer true in 2018 - only some are on Blogger now - not a positive sign).
What excites me more is my own speculation that the quietness surrounding the Blogger platform indicates to me that Google is working hard on upgrading it to become a richer HTML5 site with much more dynamic templates and usability that you find from sites built on responsive frameworks like Twitter's Bootstrap, Boilerplate or HTML Kickstart. These frameworks are completely designed to be fluid on all devices (something Google cares about deeply) so that one template can satisfy any device from Android phones/tablets, iPhones and iPads to full high resolution desktop displays.
Nevertheless, blogging has changed considerably in the last three years by being overrun by social networking, which, in its own way has become a kind of micro-blogging pattern. People now look across a vast landscape of options when they're looking for information which is pushing blogs away from personal interactive journeys to something else. What that 'something else' is may be difficult to describe, but in my honest opinion it is informational articles that coexist with social networks that are clearly linked to search.
Audiences are no longer built up directly on the blogging platform as much as they're collected through other means of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other social sources. It's a definition difference between a 'personal interactive journey' on social networks and 'important information' in blogs where that information is something that answers searchable questions.
What does this mean to you, the blogger? It means that you need to expand beyond the blog itself as the source of what you are online - a part of a bigger piece of the full network - especially more media and social awareness such as live blogging. The interaction happens socially -- whereas the information happens in your blog.
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| Source: DigitalRalph - Creative Commons |
What excites me more is my own speculation that the quietness surrounding the Blogger platform indicates to me that Google is working hard on upgrading it to become a richer HTML5 site with much more dynamic templates and usability that you find from sites built on responsive frameworks like Twitter's Bootstrap, Boilerplate or HTML Kickstart. These frameworks are completely designed to be fluid on all devices (something Google cares about deeply) so that one template can satisfy any device from Android phones/tablets, iPhones and iPads to full high resolution desktop displays.
Nevertheless, blogging has changed considerably in the last three years by being overrun by social networking, which, in its own way has become a kind of micro-blogging pattern. People now look across a vast landscape of options when they're looking for information which is pushing blogs away from personal interactive journeys to something else. What that 'something else' is may be difficult to describe, but in my honest opinion it is informational articles that coexist with social networks that are clearly linked to search.
Audiences are no longer built up directly on the blogging platform as much as they're collected through other means of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other social sources. It's a definition difference between a 'personal interactive journey' on social networks and 'important information' in blogs where that information is something that answers searchable questions.
What does this mean to you, the blogger? It means that you need to expand beyond the blog itself as the source of what you are online - a part of a bigger piece of the full network - especially more media and social awareness such as live blogging. The interaction happens socially -- whereas the information happens in your blog.
I kind of feel Google's strategy is unclear forcing users to guess work their next move. This is not good! Integrating its various products - esp. ones (like Mail, Forms etc) built under the apps platform and others (like Blogger, Picasa) preceding them is frustrating. There appear to be too many products that do not work with one another.
ReplyDeleteAudiences are no longer built up directly on the blogging platform as much as they're collected through other means of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other social sources.
ReplyDeletequote ;)
DeleteThe answer to this will lie with advertising revenue. If Google is making enough from Blogger they will maintain it. If it is not bringing in enough revenue to fund the cost of updates they may decide to kill it or migrate it into another product. I seriously doubt they have any long term commitment to the Blogger platform. They have killed so many products in recent years (Google Video, Wave, Picasa, Feedburner). Some of these exist as different products now, but Blogger was not originally a Google product and it is not a good fit into their current "ecosystem" approach. Look at Chrome browser and Chromecast. They fit well into the home automation, Google Home, ethos. G Suite fits into that too, as does the whole Play Store thing. It is hard to see where Blogger fits into this. Blogger is also suffering from increased comment spamming with little way of controlling that.
ReplyDeleteI dont know why, but I love blogger instead of wordpress. I know wordpress is a professional platform but what I think is that blogger is a brother of google and google help his brother more than any other relative like wordpress. ;-)
ReplyDeleteAs much as I love working with Blogger I'm not completely convinced Google will keep it in the same form it is today. Be sure to backup your blogs!
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