Take Control of Your Blog

Posted: January 12th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media News | No Comments

I just heard about a great new service from Google that I’m shocked and pleased they’re offering. Chalk it up to Google’s open source mentality I suppose. This from Weblog Tools Collection:

Google Open Source Blog: Google Blog Converters 1.0 Released: Blogger (now) allows users the ability to export all contents of their blog, the Data Liberation team would like to announce the Google Blog Converters project. This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress. This is after Google decided to allow Blogger users to import and export data from Blogger.

BIG kudos to Google for realizing that more people may sign up if they realize they won’t be locked into using one service for the rest of their blogging lives, or lose all of their posts when they decide to move. Services like Blogger are good for a first blog … allowing you to learn about what it takes to keep a blog running without incurring any hosting or domain registry expenses. However, I recommend if you’re going to actually keep a blog running you need to eventually get it onto your own domain so you can reap the SEO and branding benefits. This has truly set Blogger up as a “sandbox” of sorts.

I usually don’t root for the “big guys” like Google, but more companies need to think like they do.

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