Blogger.com, a famous blogging software has released a new feature to all of its users. According to this post, it would allowed all of its users that carry the sub-domain of BlogSpot, i.e. example.blogspot.com to have their own domain name in their blog address. Most interesting is, this domain forwarding is free provided by Blogger and the existing sub-domain, i.e. http://example.blogspot.com will still be existed on the Web. However, the users must configure the DNS server setting by themselves. The method is quite simple as explained by Blogger’s help page, from this page:

To take care of this, you need to create a CNAME record for your domain with the DNS, associating your domain with ghs.google.com. The exact procedure for doing this varies depending on your domain registrar.

Once you’ve told one particular DNS server about your new domain, it will have to transfer that information to all the other servers on the internet, which could take a couple of days. So be aware that your new domain won’t necessarily be working instantly.

My view is that this is a lock-in strategy deployed by Blogger in order to prevent its users from switching to other blogging platforms. I’m not surprised of this tactical move by Blogger, as my previous post, entitled “Google become a domain name reseller“. I knew Google would made use of its database by trying to promote the domain name services to its existing users sooner or later.