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Blogger, owned by Google, doing nothing to advance blogging

Following on the heals of my post on Yahoo’s advancing the cause of blogs, we have Google, the perceived blog market leader a year ago when it acquired Blogger, ignoring the improvement of blog tools. Blogger is getting stale on the shelf and frankly, law firms and lawyers using Blogger for a professional marketing blog to grow business look foolish.

Doc Searls, consummate Internet commentator, author and longtime PR & advertising person tells the story well in a post by him today.

It’s been more than two years since Ev Williams announced Blogger’s sale to Google (right next to me on stage in Los Angeles, when my first words on the matter were ‘holy shit’). There was a widespread assumption at the time that Google would crush all competition in the market space. Instead, Google has done remarkably little with Blogger, at least as far as users can tell. From the users’ side it looks like the deal was mostly about grabbing up a few million pages for advertising placement……There’s also the monopoly problem. Just as Microsoft all but quit innovating with its browser after it achieved a monopoly (as Apple later did with Safari), Google all but quit innovating with Blogger. Not because it had a huge market share with Blogger, but because it had a monopoly role in advertising on blogs……There is enormous room for improvement in blogging tools. Does anybody believe that the current assortment of instruments for writing on the Web is the End State of things?…..We have a long way to go, folks. I mean that as a very optimistic statement.”

Blogger is an outdated tool for a professional marketing blog. If you’re a lawyer or law firm bloging as a hobby and using Blogger, that’s cool. But if you are blogging to gain business, I wouldn’t take pride in saving a few bucks in order to loose tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars in business. You could probably save a few cents in printing your own letter head, doing your own Web site and practicing in a poll barn. I suspect you’d pass on all three.

By the way, you could do a lot worse than becoming a regular reader of the Doc Searls Weblog. The guy was one of four authors of the Web site turned book, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

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