Introduction
Once upon a time, Google made a search engine, and Pyra Labs made Blogger (or at least that's what Wikipedia says). Then Google figured that it could be handy to own a blogging tool themselves, so they purchased Blogger in 2003, leading to even more confusion about the difference between Blogger and bloggers, Google and googling.
They also purchased a number of other products, and build a few (eg AdSense) themselves, too.
In general, using products from the same company is a good idea, because there are engineers whose job it is to make sure that they work together well. They're not always 100% successful, but even so, two Google products are more likely to play nicely than two products from competing companies.
The list below doesn't show all Google products, just those that are particularly useful to Blogger users.
Always see the official Google documentation for official answers.
Product / Application | What it does | Where to get help |
---|---|---|
Gmail | Email. Mail can also be used for receiving comment notifications, and for tracking use of the the Mail2Post feature. | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
Picasa | Manage photographs and other image files. Blogger puts pictures uploaded using the Post Editor into a folder in your Picasa-web-albums account. You can also work separately with Picasa (on your own PC) or Picasa-web-albums (on the internet) too. | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
AdSense | Selling advertising space on your blog (or any other web-site). | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
Analytics | Measuring visits and visitors to your website/blog: this tool give you information about who they are, where they're coming form and what they're looking at. Some people say that it's more suitable for small businesses than individuals, but I say if you're savvy enough to make Blogger sing, with is the tool to go for. | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
Maps | Creating and sharing maps | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
YouTube | Sharing videos Note: though YouTube is linked to Google, your Google account doesn't work quite as seamlessly as it does with the other products listed. | Help centre Help forum |
AdWords | Getting your website/blog included in the sponsored-links section of Google search-results, and in Ads-by-Google in various places. | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
Google Docs | For creating, editing and storing documents of all types. | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: |
Calendar | Managing schedules and calendars on the internet | Help centre Help forum |
Web-elements | Application for ... | Help centre Help forum |
Webmaster Central | Monitoring your blog / website, and controlling some aspects of how Google's search engine relates to it. | Help centre Help forum |
Custom-Search | Creating and managing custom-search engines for your website | Help centre Help forum |
Google Apps | Managing custom domains | Help centre Help forum Blogger-HAT: Setting up your custom domain |
Feedburner | Application for managing feeds | Help centre Help forum |
Google Feed API | "With the Feed API, you can download any public Atom, RSS, or Media RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content" | Developer documentation Help |
Related Articles:
Understanding Google accounts
Blogs, Blogger and bloggers, Pages, Posts and Screens - basic Blogger concepts.
Blogger and key non-Google products