Using your own domain with Blogger

Garett Rogers writes:
Use your own domain with new Blogger feature
A brand new feature in the “New Blogger” lets you associate your own domain with an account without worrying about FTP settings or being stuck with a “blogspot.com” address.  My first blog about Google was Google Addiction hosted on Blogger — but it would have been really handy if I could simply point that domain [...]
[via Googling Google]

After Google became a domain registrar speculation was rife as to what they were up to. Recently they’ve started making new domain-based services available including a version of googlemail. With their acqusition of Blogger.com, therefore, the abiliity to associate a Blogger account with a personal domain seems like a logical step.

Domain pointing is nothing new. Years ago I set up my first site on Freeserve, bought the oddbooks.co.uk domain and pointed it to my Freeserve domain. But for pointing to work, the hosting service (in this case Google) needs to let you configure its settings to recognise the pointing domain. That feature is what Google have added.

If you have a blog hosted by Google you might consider this as a step towards creating a full-blown website of your own, by getting your domain out there and linked. Presumably Google’s search will not penalise such domains for duplicate content, though that remains to be seen.