ngeTrend s!te BLOG - It’s In English

Here’s a sampling of features that might make you want to use WordPress.com. (Besides it being run by some swell folks!) We’re not fancy-pants marketers, just a group of geeks who are passionate about enabling people to publish on the web. You can explore our features below, browse our list of well known WordPress bloggers, or find out which features some of our users like best. When you’re ready, we’d love to have you sign up for a blog with us!

Features:

1. It Takes Seconds and is Free!
2. Dozens of Gorgeous Themes
3. Categorize and Tag Your Posts
4. Spell-check, Previews, Autosave, Words, Photos, Videos
5. Integrated Stats System
6. Automatic Spam Protection
7. Lots of Privacy Options, including Members-Only Blogs
8. Import from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and More
9. Great Help If You Need It
10. A Great Blogging Community
11. Easily Track Followups to your Comments
12. Sidebar Widgets for Flickr, del.icio.us, Meebo, and More
13. Manage Regular Pages, not Just Blog Posts
14. Export
15. Multiple Blogs and Multiple Authors
16. No Rebuilding
17. Very Fast and Reliable Service
18. Advertising

Sound good? Start a blog in seconds »

Source: http://wordpress.com/features/

Popularity: 69% [?]

Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren’t exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people’s free beer.)

We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn’t matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm… that’s kinda interesting.

Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.

Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google

We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.

Now we’re a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world’s information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.

For more on Google, check google.com. (Also good for searching.)

Sources: http://www.blogger.com/about

Popularity: 65% [?]