Blogger is a weblog publishing system owned by Google since 2003. Blogger enables blogs to be hosted on its own servers (http://www.blogger.com/ with the blog created as a subdomain of blogspot.com, i.e. foo.blogspot.com) or on the server of the blogger’s choosing, transferred via FTP or SFTP.
Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in August 1999. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format.
In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features that Pyra charged for to be free. About a year later, Pyra Labs’ co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.
Google purchased Picasa in 2004; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello, into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.
On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by e-mail.
On 14 August 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed Invader, alongside the gold release. Blogger Beta uses a new, dynamic platform, that eliminates the need to update static HTML pages through programming. As of yet, this feature is only possible with blogs hosted on BlogSpot. Users to wish to upgrade to Blogger Beta must migrate their data into a new or existing Google Account. This gives the benefits of tighter integration with other Google services. Other updates to Blogger include labels/tags, drag-and-drop template editing and reading permissions.