08 Jun 2004 | Colin said...

From a cost standpoint, Blogger is hard to beat for people who are just seeking basic blog capability. The fact that Blogger supports web standards and is easy to use is just icing on the cake.

08 Jun 2004 | Woody said...

I cut my blogging teeth with Blogger and BloggerPro several years ago, but left for a TypePad account because of "passive FTP" issues with my hosting compnay. Although it certainly offered more functionality, I switched back to Blogger for it's simplicity and cost. The only thing I really miss is "post categories".

08 Jun 2004 | Derek said...

The lack of categories and the lack of support for RSS (only Atom) for new users are the only remaining annoyances for me.

I've used Blogger and then Blogger Pro (with my own templates, and since I was a Pro user I do get to generate RSS) since late 2000, and it does the job nicely without requiring me to install anything. I like being able to have single-page archives for each month (or week, or whatever) without the clutter of individual page archives, but maybe that's because I've just gotten used to it.

Philosophically, I wish Google would be a little more standards-compliant with Blogger, not in the HTML but in other ways. Being able to generate both RSS and Atom feeds would be good. Having a "Blog This" button on the Google toolbar that supported tools other than Blogger (through a standard API) would be better. That sort of thing. But for me personally, none of that gets in the way, and no matter how good TypePad is, I'm happy with the Blogger service I get.

08 Jun 2004 | Aaron said...

Just idle wondering, but what's the huge thing stopping Blogger from making categories? They don't believe it's good for posts to have categories or...what? I have to admit that I'd be posting daily on a blogger blog (and, further, reccomending it to all my friends) if it would only give me categories.

08 Jun 2004 | pb said...

I haven't checked Blogger in awhile but I'm finding Typepad lacking in some ways. First, the pre-designed templates are very mediocre. Creating your own Advanced template sets isn't too difficult but they could make it a lot easier by cleaning up the spaghetti code you start with. The whole interface always feels really awkward even though it looks great. And I actually do worry that it's a Perl app which tend to be weak. There's a good opportunity here for Word Press, especially given SixApart need to generate big dollars and Blogger's Atom-insistance.

08 Jun 2004 | Anil said...

(Disclaimer: My job, among other things is to shill TypePad.)

pb, I'm curious, I've seen you complain about our tools running on Perl for a while, and I honestly can't even imagine how, as an end user, that's relevant.

Just for reference, I think most of the people who choose TypePad over someting like Blogger prefer it because of features like photo albums, drag-and-drop page styling (you don't have to edit CSS or HTML to redesign your page), categories and trackbacks on posts, post scheduling, and TypeLists for tracking blogrolls or music/reading lists.

08 Jun 2004 | Mike said...

Whoa, deja vu.

As TypePad user since the middle of last summer and a blogger user for about 5 minutes when they first launched I think that the TypePad user interface (inside the application I'm talking) is far superior to the Blogger one.

Maybe it's because I'm used to TypePad and Movable Type, but the dark colors in the Blogger interface don't seem right to me. I want my weblog cheerful, and interesting, and engaging... and dark colors just don't do it. BTW: forget the fact my blog has a black background :)

TypePad is more grown up, in my opinion. Maybe the Blogger folk spent too much time on visual design, and not enough on usage design. Strange though, Adaptive Path usually puts out quality user experiences.

08 Jun 2004 | Anthony said...

I don't feel they target the same user bases. The tools used by a professional publisher differ from the tools used by an amateur, as do they differ from the tools used by ibm, etc.

Though, I felt like even after the redesign, Blogger still felt like... Blogger. The application under the new interface hasn't changed much, and has always felt sort of clunky to me for the job it's doing. I suppose if you ONLY want a blog, blogger does a reasonable job at it.

... "Publishing your blog.. This may take several minutes.."

Heh. Whatever.

Following that you can go look at your professionally designed template that's in use by 50k other people and has a horrid blog spot banner hovering over it.

TypePad starts to target the user wanting more. I think the overlap is more minor than is perceived. Certain people don't even care that there's much configuration that could go into their site, they'd just like to write.

But what if you want even more? Personally I'm quite sick of the "squish all elements on to a single page blogs". I suppose if you'd like to avoid that, you'll have to use something like I'm using =]

08 Jun 2004 | ramanan said...

I think both systems have their merits, and both systems have slightly different user bases. I see Blogger as a great tool for the straight up novice. Blogger is very simple to use, and with the Blogger-redux, produces very nice looking pages. Typepad is also a good tool for novices, and with its richer feature set can it can cater to novice users who are looking to do more with their web sites.

Mind you, Blogger is free, and it's hard to beat that.

09 Jun 2004 | allan said...

Given an option, I would say Typepad's option of a 30-day trial period leaves some to be desired.

Personally, I don't know if I'm interested in porting over for a month and then switching back.

I prefer blogger for it's "free-ness" but I would look more into Typepad if it had a bare-bones free version.

09 Jun 2004 | pb said...

For whatever reason, when comparing say php-based solutions vs. Perl counterparts, the php ones always seem "better". Example: Word Press vs. MT, OSCommerce vs. Interchange, Vbulletin/phpbb vs. the field, etc.

I actually think end users should be acutely aware of the components that make up the solution that they are going to use. For example, with Basecamp, some might see Ruby productivity as an advantage while others may see it as risky. I think that sort of analysis is totally legitimate when selecting something and am always surprised to see people suggest that end users shouldn't care.

09 Jun 2004 | DH said...

The blogger redesign has been great ... there are some great templates from some of the best known designers / web standards gurus out there: Zeldman, Dave Shea, Doug Bowman ... etc. etc. It's been getting a fair amount of press, but I think it also deserves some industry respect as it really is impressive.

I've never used TypePad, and I've just shifted my blogger blog over to WordPress - moving away from a hosted solution. But the Blogger redesign means that you can get top notch, compliant, good looking, web design for your personal site / blog without paying for it. What's to chose?

09 Jun 2004 | AK said...

I've looked at many, including writing my own, but as soon as Blogger allowed postings via email it won me over.

It's now easy to create a post from any computer at any time, save it locally, and submit it without having to log in, type the entry, and hit publish.

Now I can spend more time adding this to a blog rather than getting to the administration interfaces.

09 Jun 2004 | Silus Grok said...

PB: Considering the audience of both products, I would submit that caring (much less understanding) the inner workings of their system of choice is the farthest thing from their minds.

It may be of consequence h; as a poorly chosen platform / component will ultimately impact performance / longevity h; but that's different from it actually playing a role in the decision-making process.

09 Jun 2004 | David Ely said...

I think a more apt comparison would be LiveJournal to Blogger. Both are targeted to beginner users and neither have advanced features like photo pages.

As for RSS vs. Atom I don't see why beginner users have any reason to care. Both formats let people get updates when new content goes up. Most newsreaders now support both. XML feeds are confusing enough for newbies, why make it harder for them by making them choose between formats when either will do for their purposes?

09 Jun 2004 | pb said...

Silus, I don't understand. If it's "of consequence" then why wouldn't it "play a roll in the decision-making process"?

Software seems to be the only product where you're not supposed to care how its made. I just don't understand that line of thinking.

09 Jun 2004 | Jason Wall said...

pb,

The quality of a software product is largly dependent on the guy developing it. MovableType, and I'm assumign TypePad, is a robust, object-oriented, well built cms because Ben Trott is a disciplined and experienced programmer. Had he chosen to build MT in PHP, it would likely be just as powerful.

And in defense of Perl, having programmed in both Perl and PHP, I can say Perl is a more flexible language. There is a reason it became as ubiquitous as it is and remains a dominant scripting language on the web. Back before PHP was an idea, Perl was happily making websites dynamic, handling complex networking problems, and even writing poetry. :)

Personally, I've always found Blogger a bit restrictive. Its a nicely done app, just a bit lean for my tastes.

10 Jun 2004 | Silus Grok said...

pb: just because something is important doesn't mean that consumers pay any attention to it... you don't have to go much farther afield than the typical US Presidential election to find plenty of examples of this phenomenon. Consumers inherently judge the objects of their desire on the most understandable (not necessarily the most important) of the object's qualities. Put another way: consumers want to maximize value and minimize effort.

10 Jun 2004 | adnan said...

i just switched from blogger to wordpress because of the categories.

11 Jun 2004 | Elaine said...

I'm using Blogger, WP and MT. (yay! I have a LiveJournal account too, but I don't ever use it.)

I wish that Blogger had taken on categories instead of commenting...it's the one feature that makes me look to something else for what I'm using it for now.

otherwise, it's been pretty good for us. the ease of having both multiple authors and multiple blogs, along with the email posting, makes it a good choice for work projects.

honestly, I think it's wonderful that there are at least four strong contenders in this space...hopefully, no one will get the monopoly advantage.

11 Jun 2004 | Aaron said...

I have to agree that Blogger is great for most people as a free service. For those of us who can easily put together a comparable system for personal use (without fancy templating or FTP, but just a simple news or blog engine), it's nothing fantastic. I think that with categories it would be a lot better ( me thinking more on categories)

12 Jun 2004 | kengo said...

Hi.

I am using Blogger.com and MT.First,I think weakpoint of Blogger.com is category,but Blogger.com allows create another blog easy.

It can uses like category.Posting from bookmarklet called "Blog This" is easy.If you have some blogs on blogger.com,Blog this bookmarklet shows select options in entry views.It's like category.This way you can use some blogs for your categories.And it is free and good template is appeal for beginners.

12 Jun 2004 | Daniel said...

Blogger est gratuit et facile utiliser ; il ne manque rellement que les catgories.

12 Jun 2004 | Jez said...

I've used Blogger and TypePad and think they're both excellent products. Both offer a turnkey solution for blog hosting and both products do this very well.

TypePad is light years ahead of Blogger in terms of user interface design and its commenting system is much better than the awful blogger implementation.

In Blogger's favour, the basic TypePad package only give 1gb/month of bandwidth whereas Blogger (with Blogspot) has no limited. Blogger has nice templates too, and the new 'User Profiles' have serious potential. Also, nearly all the features TypePad has that Blogger doesn't can be added with (free) third-party services. For example, you can get proper commenting and TrackBacks with Haloscan, blogrolls with Blogrollin and images with Hello BloggerBot.

The fundamental problem with TypePad-- as with other SixApart products-- is that it's cripple-ware unless you spend lots of cash. Dedicated photo albums, custom styling and multiple authors are only available if you're willing to spend $14/month. Even then, you're limited by what you can (or rather, can't) do with the service, and in that regard, there is no real advantage of using TypePad over blogger.

TextDrive- the new blogger/typepad-ish hosting service based on TextPattern- seems a lot more flexible and even offers shell access.

18 Jun 2004 | programmer said...

Perl weak? It's probably the most serious tool out there, perhaps next to Java. It's had almost no problems, while ASP and PHP has had several. Amazon is written using it. I could go on...

20 Jan 2005 | lolita said...

Hello folks nice blog youre running

04 Feb 2005 | Penis Enlargement Pills said...

Enlarge Penis Size Increase Penis Size Naturally Erection Pill For Man Male Enhancement Review