I think Blogger has surprised everyone. The personal publishing tool doesn't really do very much: just store a chronilogical list of postings and FTP them to the Web host of the user's choice. But in an era of complex Web creation tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, Blogger is finding a very broad audience by shifting the task of creating a Web site from coding and HTML authoring to simply creating content. Weblogs and blogging software existed before Blogger, but it and similar personal content management systems have brought Web publishing to a much wider audience.

The challenge for Blogger now is sustainability. Pyra has to keep their servers running, update the software, pay for bandwidth, and worry about security, but have no business model that I can see. It will be interesting to see if the future belongs to hosted services like Blogger, or commercial client software like Radio Userland.