Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Also, Anothr is making it easy to receive RSS feed updates in Google Talk. Read more at Download Squad. Finally, Google released today a

Pingdom, an uptime monitoring company today released a report measuring the downtimes of the 20 most visited websites in the United States in the first three months of 2007.
The report says that Google has 7 minutes of downtime so far. YouTube and Blogger each has more than 4 hours, making themselves having the highest downtimes on the list (Yahoo! has 0 min).
Big Bro’ of Downtime?

Did you know that staff writer Jordan McCollum is also a MamaBlogga?
Well, she recently went through the nightmare that is known as the “Blogger to WordPress switch”, something we went through last year. Anyway, she’s uploaded a detailed guide to how she did it, and passed on lots of cool tips for others considering making the switch.
Pilgrim Partners: SEO Copywriters - offering well-researched, interesting and informative cont

A story titled “75 per cent of Google’s blogspot blogs are spam” made to Digg’s homepage a few hours ago. I know that there are a lot of splogs on Blogger, but 75%? That’s a crazy exaggeration!
Jason Goldman, Blogger’s ex-Product Manager, seems to agree with my viewpoint (okay, maybe I agree with him).
In any case, it turns out that the study didn’t look at all URLs and count the spam. They took a bunch

I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because

I was complaining last month about the way Blogger sorts feeds (by last update, instead of published date). Phydeaux3 found the solution: you just have to add a parameter to the feed address. Instead of:http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/defaultyou’ll use:http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=publishedTo actually change the address of your blog’s feed, you’ll have to edit the template or to modify the address of the origi

Lots of sites reporting news that Google has taken down a Blogger blog, after it posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician.
Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand today said the weblog was taken down this morning after a complaint from the Ministry of Social Development. She said it was not just yesterday’s death threat that prompted the site shutdown, but that Google believed it was repeat violation of site rules.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Google doesn’t move as quickly - or at all - for regular requests

The new Blogger has updated the feed format from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0. One of the most important change is that Blogger sorts the feed item by updated date, so if you edit a post written last year, that post will go to the top of the feed.Not all feed readers care about the element, but most of the time you’ll see the updated post appearing as new

A few Blogger bloggers have noticed their SERPs acting funny lately—they’re not there. Of course, the first hypothesis is that they’ve incurred some penalty from the search engines. But SEOptimise.com, one of the affected Blogger blogs, thought to check their code.
A little background: Blogger has made up a bunch of really ugly generic code so they can create generic templates that work for all their blogs without every blogger having to go through the code and insert their blog’s name, meta data, posts, etc

Spammers found a new way to drive traffic to their spammy sites or affiliates: create tons of free BlogSpot blogs, put some content in the templates, create links between all the blogs and redirect the visitors to the spammy sites. Apparently, this scheme works and the redirect seems smart too.A search for “how students loans affect fico score”, BlogSpot redirect spam dominates the top 100 results (all the top 35 results are BlogSpot blogs).Here’s what you see when you click on the top result:..

If you have a blog hosted on Blog*Spot and you’ve upgraded to the new version, there’s an easy way to backup your blog.This page lists the latest N posts from the blog:http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=NInstead of N, type the number of posts. If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue

The Google Reader team added a little convenience for Blogger users: If you’re using the new Blogger system (and practically everybody is now), you can add a Google Reader widget to your blog sidebar just by clicking an “Add to Blogger” button. Reader is taking advantage of Blogger’s new architecture to streamline the process for users, making it completely unnecessary for less experienced users to have to edit code.
Oh, what does the widget do? If you are sharing feed items, like some bloggers do, making a nice little link blog, you can use it to display the latest headlines to your blog readers

The jury has reached a verdict: people from Blogger are simply unable to build a reliable blog software. The old version of Blogger had a lot problems and it’s interesting to read this blog post from the Blogger team written in October, last year:You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones

So you want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Some information is available for free (the web), other information requires subscriptions or should be bought (books), there’s information too hard to find (rare documents) and information too personal (your emails).The first content acquisition for Google was Usenet, a collection of bulletin-board messages

A message posted by a Blogger employee on Google Groups announces that the time when Blogger users would be forced to switch to the new Blogger has come:We’ve been giving you warnings. The signs have been there. Preparations have been made. Now, it’s time! That’s right, it’s time to embrace the new version of Blogger! Starting today, a small percentage of users who log in to an old Blogger account will be required to move to the new version

I’ve seen these image for almost a month on my blog’s dashboard, but everytime I tried to switch to the new Blogger, I got an error. But today something strange happened and I could finally switch my blog, and although there were more than 6000 posts and comments, the switch finished in around 20 minutes (you may have see an error earlier)

Tony Ruscoe, the person who found Google's latest vulnerability, goes into detail about how he found the problem, what it would have meant for victims, and exactly how it worked.  He explains how a new feature in Blogger was easily exploited to give him access to Philipp's Google account.
"As any web developer will know, a [...]

This is good news for all bloggers that are using Google’s Blogger service and hosting via their free BlogSpot.com service.
Nathan reports Blogger has introduced a new service that allows you to point any domain name to Google’s DNS servers (ghs.google.com) and get all the benefits of using a TLD (top level domain).

With domain names costing less than ten bucks a year, it’s a quick and easy way to get free hosting for you blog, while branding it via your own domain name

Blogger added a new feature: Bring your own domain. All you have to do is buy a domain, anywhere, at any price you can find, set up your Blogger account and point your DNS at Google’s server at ghs.google.com, and viola*! Now your Blogger blog appears at its own domain name, and all you had to do was pay less than ten bucks a year for the domain

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 [...]

Amit Agarwal found a weird one: When you upload images to Blogger, the free uploading and storage service delivers you two versions of the image, a full size version and a smaller 400 pixel wide version. Blogger will do this for you automatically, so long as the image is larger than 400 pixels, even if it is only slightly larger, and that is where the problem is

While doing a site search today that included the word “blog” in the domain I noticed something new. At the very top of the search results was an ad disguised as what Google called a “Tip.”

I tested additional keyword searches for which Google has related or competing services but they seem to be drinking their own koolaid and running Adword ads for their other branches

The Blogger Buzz blog has announced that the new version of Blogger is now feature complete. They’ve released the new Blogger Beta for team-run blogs, all new accounts are on the beta, the number of known issues are decreasing, and almost every single Blogger user can move over to the new system (some really large blogs still have problems). That all means one thing: That beta tag won’t last for much longer. Great to hear it, as the new Blogger infrastructure should be a lot more stable and easier for Google to run. Great work by the Blogger guys.

Ryan Is Hungry has an video interview with Eric Case from Developer Relations and Blogger at Google, with him talking about the growing pains lately of moving Blogger over to the new architecture. He says their status blog has been a “tale of woe” of late, as they move Blogger from its old architecture to Google-standard architecture, a difficult transition process, but one that will be worth it in the end. It’s only nine minutes, so watch it and enjoy.
(via Biz)
By the way, is it just me, or does Erice have a cool thing going on with the left side of his hair?

When users experience problems with Blogger, the beta alternative is usually recommended by Google.  But what happens if you find a bug in the new Blogger beta?  Well, if you ask Nathaniel Bragdon, reporting it doesn't produce results.
When he found an annoying bug that prevented him from using Google Docs to post articles about money [...]