Blogger www.blogger.com

I used Blogger for a couple of years back when I was keeping an online diary of self development. A few of my friends were doing the same thing and we had links to each others blogs on our home pages.

This was quite a cool thing as I had set my blog so it wasn't searchable by random people, it was after all an open diary filled with my personal thoughts and experiences. But specific friends could read it and pass on advice and encouragement.

I often added photographs and video to my blog posts and found this very easy and quick to do, you can do the video thing in several ways including embedding links from YouTube.

Overall I found Blogger to be a very useful and easy to use website, it still amazes me that it is free!

Blogger is a free blog hosting service using it's own software. It's easy to use and setup, and being a part of the Google network can link to your GoogleAds and GoogleMail systems. In addition to this 'widgets' can be added to your blogs from third party sources, such as Flickr from Yahoo.

Generally a very good blogging tool with just one very major draw back, the 'next blog' button located on a navigation bar placed at the top of every blog. The sheer number of blogs on Blogger is amazing, I've never come across the same blog twice when using the 'next blog' button, but the downside to this is that there are a great deal of pornographic or sites referencing material that parents would consider highly unacceptable for their children to be viewing. Blogger does not give any option to opt out of the 'next blog' ring and so you are forced to run the risk that your family blog may be linked to legally questionable material without any control over it.

Until the Blogger team makes their system safer for family viewing their content rating will remain at 5, and I think I'm being very generous in doing this. I should point out that there are other blog systems such as Wordpress which do not have this failing, come on Blogger (and Google) sort this very simple problem out before the lawyers do it for you.