Google's Blogger fixes bug, adds video uploading
(InfoWorld) - Google's Blogger team solved a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service this week and introduced a new feature that gives publishers the ability to upload videos to their sites.
Context & Ripple Effects
Blogger's video feature arrives two weeks after [[a:1179505|VideoCafé began piping video content from Google, Yahoo! and Intel directly into bloggers' hands]] — evidence that video-in-blogs was becoming a contested layer rather than a novelty. It also lands on the heels of a confirmed walkthrough of embedding Google Maps in a blog, part of a summer run of posts treating Blogger less as a text host than an assembly point for media widgets.
The strategic subtext is Google's completed acquisition of YouTube the previous November: with its own video infrastructure in hand, giving publishers a native upload path inside Blogger keeps that traffic and storage on Google's side of the fence instead of routing through third-party embed services.
First-order effects
- Bloggers on the platform can publish video natively this week — no more stitching together outside hosts and embed code — while the publishing bug fix removes a reliability irritant for every active blog on the service.
Second-order effects
- Aggregation plays like VideoCafé lose their differentiation at the low end: if Blogger ships upload built in, the middleman's value has to shift to curation and cross-source content rather than plumbing.
Third-order effects
- Hosting platforms are being pushed to absorb rich-media capability in-house, converting blog services from text-and-template products into full multimedia stacks where whoever owns the video backend (as Google now does via YouTube) can subsidize features competitors must pay to match.
The trend: Blogging platforms are internalizing video publishing rather than delegating it to third-party embed services, with owners of video infrastructure best positioned to lead.