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I’ve been using Blogger to create a new Screen Arts blog and I really like it. I tried out Blogger when it first started and had a bit of the usual, “that’s too simple for a geek like me” attitude, but it was an important step in the development of the blogosphere. I found In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History by Alberto Gonzales that takes us back to 1999 when Pyra was making Blogger and other cool stuff. Google bought Pyra last year and they’ve been revamping and developing Blogger. I was looking for an alternative to Movable Type since the pricing structure changed and I wasn’t sure if I could get all of the pieces in place to continue having the site hosted at work. So I tried out Blogger again and I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s simple and it works well. But the neat thing is how it is evolving. I can audioblog or blog by mail (which I haven’t done yet) and you can also work with Flickr to add photos to the free Blogspot hosting. They also removed the ads from Blogspot and added a toolbar at the top. It’s a good thing to be with Google and I’m hoping that somehow I’ll be able to get a Gmail account soon as well to play with that too. It’s all part of the evolution of a lot of this stuff where it doesn’t really matter where you are or what particular device you are using. Tim O’Reilly talks about it in the IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye called The Software Paradigm Shift.