Blogger craze started with Google?

It's amazing how an article can be so wrong. The SMU Daily Campus seems to think that the blogging craze began with the purchase of Blogger by Google earlier this year:

Although blogging has occurred since the mid-'90s, the blogging craze did not begin until Google bought Blogger.com from PYRA labs in February of 2003. According to the Blogger.com Web site, Blogger started out as a small company developed in San Francisco by PYRA to develop web tools for the average person. After surviving the dot-com boom and bust, PYRA was acquired by Google. Google has now incorporated the software into its toolbar so that any user can click a button and set up a blog site. Blogger.com estimates that 1 million people are posting blogs, with the number growing daily.

Sorry folks, you don't know what you're talking about. Google owning Blogger has done nothing for the blogging craze. As far as I can tell, Google has set Blogger adrift with many of the serious Blogger users leaving in droves for serious blogging software. Secondly, the authors of the article seem to think that the Blogger button on the Google toolbar somehow creates a blog or somehow enables blogging. It doesn't. All it does is open a new blog post in Blogger with the site's URL so you can more easily link to the site from your blog. It really has no practical significance other than operating as an advertisement for Blogger sitting on the toolbar.

We've got quite a bit invested in the future of Blogger and hope they do well. However, all that has happened since the sale to Google in February is the dropping of Blogger Pro. And what has that accomplished? It has left some of the features of the former Pro available to the former Pro users, but not to the new users of Blogger. In essence, anyone who signs up for Blogger now is getting a crippled version. Blogger is cutting it's own throat with this bit of non-logic.