The Connections Project

Blogger

Blogger is one of many products which Google bought up once it established itself as a mover-and-shaker on the internet. Blogger is one of the major hubs of blogging, and Google gets a crucial advantage by having direct access to all that data, which the other search engines must painstakingly crawl like any other content. In recent years Google has been pushing to integrate its adsense programs more and more into Blogger. Blogger provides Google with tons and tons of high quality content to fill its search engine results pages, and in turn Google steers fresh readership to those blogs. In fact with the adsense program, Google basically finances a lot of the blogs on Blogger.

Functionally the two websites are quite different, Blogger is a blogging platform while Facebook is a social networking site. The two sites do have some overlap-- Facebook allows users to write notes which are not unlike blogs, and Blogger has profiles which are not unlike social networking, but ultimately the overlap is negligible and neither site threatens the other. Many bloggers (whether from Blogger or any other blogging platform) make extensive use of Facebook to market their blogs.

Blogger and Yahoo share a mutually beneficial relationship. Blogger provides tons of high quality, fresh content for Yahoo's search engine result pages, and Yahoo steers new traffic toward the blogs. However this relationship is not as tight as the one between Google and Blogger: Yahoo does not have as direct of access to the blogger data as Google does, and Yahoo drives significantly less traffic than its giant competitor.

When YouTube was making its debut into the world, a lot of its rapid growth was spurred on by bloggers who took advantage of YouTube's innovative feature where it allows videos to be embedded off-site. In this way YouTube continues to provide lots of shiny eye-catching glitz to the bloggers (whether at Blogger itself or indeed any of the blogging platforms).

Superficially one would guess that relations between Wikipedia and Blogger would be neutral: both are content-creators but the type of content created and the manner in which it's created are radically different.

But the relationship which should be neutral is actually stained with some subdued animosity. Wikipedia editors reject and distrust Blogger content beyond all reason, throwing out the baby with the bathwater in their zealous quest for professionalism. In the land of Wikimedia, any journalist writing for an obscure local paper is taken as gospel, while Blogger blogs with much greater authority are dismissed out-of-hand because of the medium.

Twitter tweets have been called "microblogs". They take the personal conversation aspect of blogging and recast it by eliminating the 2,000 word walls of text everyone's familiar with from Blogger.