I used Blogger for a couple of years ... it was my first Blog site. I paid them for the "premium" service back when they still had that option. I quit them when my site went down for several weeks ... they were unable for the longest time to find the problem, and it took forever to get them to pay attention to me at all. I don't see anything in the new announcements to convince me to return to them.

I tried Movable Type when I first started blogging, and found it impenetrable. I have had a computer and been online since 1983, had a couple of simple BASIC programs published in the mid-80s, had worked for several years as an assistant sysop on CompuServe, had been the webmaster for a long-lasting journal, and had my own personal website for many years, but I couldn't figure out Movable Type to save my life.

Thank god for TypePad, which makes Movable Type possible for "dummies" like me. I'm very happy with them. I have a LiveJournal site that I used for a temp blog while I made the transition from Blogger to TypePad, but TypePad is my #1 now.

I use Blogger, and I like it just fine. I liked it more before the upgrade, as I think its new graphic-heavy user interface makes it somewhat clunky. I do think the new networking feature is a plus, and I think that along with comment boxes help it go more in the direction of a social network, rather than just a blogging service. Blogger answers my calls quickly, but then again I am a paying member, but yes, they could do more to stop downtime. Nothing is perfect, but altogether, I like Blogger and am sticking with it.

Started on blogger, left it when a hacker got access and compromised the database of stored ftp passwords. If my blog is down, it's because a server that I can touch from my desk is down.

I could be convinced to go back, but not by this update.

I also wonder if Google counted the abandoned blogger blogs like mine in the 200,000? At the time I left, there was no way to delete your user account...

i use only the free versino of blogspot, because to be honest right now my personal blog is not worth spending money on to add any "premium" services.
It suits my needs just fine, it hasn't been down since i started writing semi-regularly on it (a few months ago now) (although the www.iamrighturpie.blogspot.com mirror was down for less than a day a little while back), and probably at least in part thanks to its ownership being Google, my site is the first, or second, result when i search my name on google.
it may not be much, but then i'm hardly getting alot of traffic so my needs are different from, say, Blogcritics.
MT does strike me as a good system for what is done here, and as far as i know, the Blogspot system isn't anywhere near so good for group blogs.

New version is new paint, some kewl looking templates, but leaves little in the way of new features or innovation. The profile thing is cool. I wonder if they will blend Orkut and blogger together somehow in the future?

Just tried it tonight and I don't like it. Used to be everything you needed was on one compact window. Now you have to scroll down just to do anything. Way too much white space, too. And you get shuffled from screen to screen now doing what used to happen in one window. Finally, you used to be able to read the post just after publish, with the edit window above, and be able to proof-read that way. No more. Ugh. I guess I'm glad I'm going over to MT soon.

Thanks for the input, guys.

what is a blog and why does it cuk monkey balls?

I had a brief run with Blogger because it was free, but realized almost immediately that the inability to directly access the server and hack the code easily was going to be a problem.

I've essentially been blogging or something like it since 1982 when I first started my BBS Necropolis of Dreams, with a hiatus when the internet came along and BBSs became obsolete.

When I first attempted blogging, before I really even knew there was a 'blogosphere', it was in the form of news and article content posted to a business website and a personal website using pretty primative software and basically typing the articles into an html file and uploading it. It required constant coding and modification and lacked the ease and spontaneity that it really needed.

Once I figured out that other people were doing the same thing and not having to go through that painful process I stumbled on blogger and gave it a try, but with my background hacking BBS software and doing everything by hand in HTML the restrictions of the blogger software were too much for me. I didn't want to use templates, I wanted to be able to go in and write my own code.

So I shopped around and found pMachine and switched over to that, hosted on my own server. I wish I'd found Wordpress first, since it's free and ultimatley I think much better than pMachine, but having done so much work on my pMachine site I'm not ready to do all the work to convert to Wordpress yet. Doing this has required me to learn how to hack whole new things like CSS and PHP files, but having worked my way through basic, html and a bit of Java it wasn't that hard.

I do think blogger and services like it are a great way for people to get into blogging quickly and easily if they don't have the need to customize a lot and have access to all the files involved.

I do have to note that my blogger page is still on there. I could never figure out how to delete the whole thing, so I put a forwarding script in my final post and that redirects people to my current blog. You can see the old one (for 60 seconds) on blogger.

Dave

Doh, got the link wrong. Here's the correct link.

Dave

agreed that Blogger is a fine way to get into it

I don't need to search my own site. I can just Google a very specific line I know I said and it will ocme up.

Blogs are for someone to say something and ask their three friends if they read it. Little more than that needs to be done.

I've been using blogger for 5 months. I don't really care about fancy stuff like message boxes and templates and posting by email.

They've frustrated me a few times with slow servers (which wiped out some long posts when I was posting them-- I learned to copy to clipboard when posting now, as a precaution)

They used to collect cool stats on #of posts, and #or words posted, but they stopped.

I'd switch in a heartbeat, except that I don't want to pay for the space; which means I'm better off staying put.

I'll just be patient, and hope over time, Google will put more of their might into making it a better service.

well i like like to type as i was saying about new south wales im studying on it if you could help

well i like like to type as i was saying about new south wales im studying on it if you could help