Blogger

Zift Advisory

The Blogger app lets users create, update, and comment on Google's blogging platform making it easy to share photos and video from your phone to your blog. Rated for users 17 years of age and older, this app is available for Android devices. Blogger contains no in-app purchases or advertisements. This app can be safe for teens with parental supervision.

About Blogger

What is Blogger?

The Blogger mobile app lets users create, update, and comment on Google's free blogging platform. The app also makes it easy to share photos and video from your phone to your blog, making it a useful tool for existing users of the platform.

Rated for users 17 years of age and older, this app is only available for Android devices. Blogger contains no in-app purchases or advertisements.

Blogger is possibly the easiest platform to master, making this a solid choice for introducing children to the process of setting up and maintaining their own blog.

The template choices are somewhat limited, but users can import custom templates, which may require the help of a technically skilled adult or older sibling.

Users must be at least thirteen years of age and have a Google Account to set up their own blog on Blogger, according to Google's terms of service. There are no age or identity verification measures in place to prevent younger users from signing up, however, and users can effectively claim to be whatever they like.

Founded in the late 90s, Blogger is one of the oldest blogging platforms on the Internet. After its acquisition by Google in 2003, Blogger was slowly integrated into the Google service ecosystem. Now, all Google account holders and Gmail users have a Blogger account by default, whether or not they actively use it or maintain their own blog on the service.

This does offer several advantages for kids learning how to set up and run blogs, including easier integration with Google AdSense. Learning how to drive traffic and ad revenue beats the heck out of getting a paper route.

Is Blogger safe for my kids?

Blogger can be safe for teens, if its privacy settings are configured correctly, but its default settings are public. This means your teen's site would be discoverable and open to comments from anyone on the Internet. Blogger does not have as many comment moderation features that are often standard on blogging platforms.

Blogger's settings either allow all comments or none at all, there is no central dashboard for monitoring and removing offensive contributions. Users have to navigate to each post, which can quickly become overwhelming when a site starts increase its audience.

There are two ways to run a more private blog, if you want to let your children user Blogger safely. First, their blog can be set up so that only other authors of their blog – directly authorized contributors, not all Blogger users – can view or comment on posts. This involves giving readers a certain level of privilege on the site, however, so you may prefer to run your child's blog as invite-only, instead. This means that only Google account holders you invite via the Blogger app can view or comment on posts.

There is no active content control for comments or user interactions on Blogger. Google’s policy does ban sexually explicit content on blogs not marked as 'adult' in the app settings, but enforcement is subject to reporting by users.