

Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp  - joshbert
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/half-a-billion-blog-posts-later-google-to-give-blogger-a-revamp/

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qwertymaniac
I hope they also get rid of 'Blogger' profiles and make Google Profiles more
unified instead, amongst all Google-provided services.

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mark_l_watson
That is good news. I used to host my own blog using a variety of CMS systems.
A few years ago, I switched to Blogger, and use a blog.- subdomain from my
main web site. Except for occasionally exporting for backup all my blog data
(as I do with Google docs and GMail), it is all hassle free.

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thetrumanshow
I hope that Blogger does such a great job of this revamp that they begin to
attract users who would otherwise choose Wordpress.

If they do this, they will have an excellent platform that developers may
consider returning to.

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kevinburke
"Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a
trillion words in total)."

The average blog post is ~1000 words? I would have guessed way shorter. The
majority of posts I read are shorter.

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petervandijck
Here's the announcement <http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-
blogger.html>

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u48998
Competition is always good. Finally an overdue upgrade and nice to see
continuous development. I think Blogger is one of the few Google product which
still has relevance and consistency. If only they had worked a little faster
to catch up with Wordpress and had controlled their spam earlier in the game.

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maxharris
_Competition is always good._

In some of your other posts, you've said that you support universal public
education, but that seems to directly contradict the statement you've made
here.

Government schools have no competition, at least where I live. When I was a
child, my parents paid taxes, which paid for government schools. They had no
choice but to send me to terrible schools because they couldn't afford
anything else after paying their taxes (my parents were not rich).

Attempts to compete against government schools are always rebuffed by people
as being "against public education". So which is it? Competition is always
good or government schools are somehow sacrosanct, or neither?

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u48998
You are comparing apples with oranges. I said competition is good because we
are talking about blogging space. Imagine if there was only one blogging
platform. It would not be a nice situation. So Wordpress and Blogger both
developing actively is a good thing for the rest of us. It would be best if
more blogging platforms could jump in and improve the space (not that there
aren't others already).

Back to education and government. You are already blaming your paying taxes as
a culprit for you attending bad government school. What proof do you have to
back up your allegation? What if there was no public school and less
government taxes and still no private school to provide you education? Do you
think private schools are only going to crop up because government isn't
charging more taxes? What guarantee is there that you'd have a good private
school in the absence of any public school? Blaming taxes for all the ills of
the government is a myth propagated by one of the political party. Check out
the countries where there are no government schools of any quality (because
people don't pay taxes and things are pretty much messed up all around). You'd
be glad you attended public school in America irrespective of the quality
compared to many other countries of the world.

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maxharris
_What proof do you have to back up your allegation?_

I served 11.5 years in a government school (not the customary 13 because I was
able to graduate early). My time there was _awful_. I would have learned more
just by staying at home!

Government school didn't even help with getting into college. I had a D
average in high school, so I privately educated _myself_ for a few years in
all kinds of ways, and got into a very nice university (and maintained a 3.89
gpa in a science major). So that's how I _know_ government school is useless.

On top of that, my mother was a government school teacher. The horror stories
she has about the way they run things are awful. This was all in the the
strongest teacher's union state in the country (WI), which made the problem
even worse. (When teachers want to set up a system to rate each other so that
better teachers earn more money, the union throws such a fit that the plan
never gets heard. When teachers want to teach foreign languages before or
after school, the government school administrators throw a fit and shut it all
down. This could not happen at a private school.)

