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Posted by the Blogger Team

2010 has been an exciting year for all of us on the global Blogger team, and our platform is now more powerful, reliable, and active than ever before. As we close the books on another great year, we want to take a moment to look back at some of the highlights.

The makeover. The new Template Designer, with beautiful new templates and iStockPhoto™ background images, was one of the team’s biggest accomplishments of the year. Since the launch in June, nearly half of our active users have begun using the new templates (if you haven't tried our new templates yet, why don't you give them a try?) Our efforts to make Blogger blogs look more beautiful continued with the release of web fonts, custom background images, and mobile-optimized views.

Some great new features. 2010 was also a year when we added tons of new features to Blogger. We had a busy summer adding two new admin tabs to Blogger: Comments and Stats. The comments tab introduced a comments inbox and spam filtering; real-time stats, followed by stats gadgets, were also highly requested features. We've also added static pages, new share buttons, WYSIWYG post preview, improved YouTube integration, Zemanta post editor gadget, integration with Google Apps, and many other new features.

Rock-solid infrastructure. Of course features don't mean much when the service goes down, and we've made lots of behind-the-scene improvements to keep our service up and running as reliably as possible. Auto-pagination was one of our many efforts to reduce latency. Sometimes keeping our infrastructure robust meant phasing out features that are used by only a fraction of our users, but have a heavy impact on our system, such as FTP publishing — which some bloggers called a "hard but smart decision."

Reaching out to real users. Perhaps the most exciting thing that we did this year was to get out more and meet the real users, like you. We set up booths at SXSW and BlogWorld Expo (our first ever presence there), and we held our 11th birthday party all around the world. In addition, our face-to-face meetings were accompanied by our conversations with you over virtual channels like our user forum and Twitter. We will continue meeting you, listening to you, and delivering what you want for Blogger in 2011.

It’s been a pretty busy year for us, but we hope 2011 will be an even busier year where we deliver even more exciting releases to you. Thanks again for all your support, and we wish you the best during this holiday season. See you in the new year!

Our ears are always open to your feedback, whether it's a request for a new feature you'd like to see, a suggested improvement to the latest release from Draft, or input during a usability study.

In that spirit, we're hoping that you'll once again help us out us by taking a quick survey about our existing monetization features. And to make it a little more fun, we'll be sending out a handful of shiny new Blogger T-shirts to a lucky bunch of survey-filler-outers (chosen at random of course!).

Thanks for the help in advance! And for those who don't win a shirt, keep an eye out for other ways to get your hands on one in the future.

Posted by The Blogger Team

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and we certainly have reason to celebrate after the folks at Royal Pingdom conducted an independent study of blogging services on the Web and found that Blogger was without question the most reliable. In fact, Blogger was the only service of all those tested that delivered 100% uptime. You can read the full article here.

Our favorite quote:
“Since Blogger was the only service with zero downtime overall, we skipped the chart here. We hope you don’t mind. It simply wouldn’t have been very interesting.”
When it comes to reliability, we certainly like being uninteresting!

This is a guest post by Eric Marcoullier, CEO of OneTrueFan. Though Blogger/Google does not have any affiliation with OneTrueFan, we’ve found OneTrueFan as an interesting way for our users to build community around their blog and get to know their audience, and so asked Eric to introduce OneTrueFan for our users. -- Chang Kim, Product Manager

You work hard to write great content and bring people to your Blogger blog. You've built a great community of loyal readers, many of them reading everything you post. Too bad it's so hard to better know who your readers are: On average, less than one percent of readers comment on an article on the web; Regularly searching Twitter, Digg, or other sites for links to your site is tedious and time consuming.

At the same time, you're likely getting good traffic from search engines and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, these readers are incredibly difficult to engage. More than 80% of a site’s traffic visits just one time and reads only one article. Visitors driven by search and social media tend to skim a blog post and then leave. Less than 24 hours later, they can't remember where they read your content, so they'll never come back.

OneTrueFan surfaces the community that exists on and around your Blogger blog, creating a deeper sense of engagement with new and returning users, and helps you get to know the people who visit.


OneTrueFan lives at the bottom of your blog. People show up in two ways: they can check in via OneTrueFan or share a link on Twitter. (In the coming weeks, people will also show up when they share a link with Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, and many other sites.) You and your readers can mouse over anyone's picture to learn more about them.


Readers earn points for coming to your site each day, reading content, sharing links and driving traffic to your site. The ten readers with the most points show up in a leaderboard, but those points only last for 14 days. Readers need to keep coming back because fanship is an ongoing process.

Now you might be asking yourself, "Why would anyone want to check into my blog?" Because they *love* your blog and want people to know that they are a part of your community. OneTrueFan is an easy way for readers to show you a bit of love without going through a lot of effort.

Getting OneTrueFan on Blogger is free and easy! Just click this link to add OneTrueFan to your Blogger blog. Once it's installed, you'll start discovering your community in no time.

Link: Install OneTrueFan to your Blogger blog

Posted by Ben Eitzen, Software Engineer

Feeds are a great way to reach a broader audience and keep your loyal readers up-to-date. In fact, it’s not uncommon for blogs to have more than a quarter of their traffic come from feed readers.

The challenge with feeds is that it’s never been possible to control exactly how much content is delivered. Up until now, the options have been “Short” and “Full”. Short produces a feed that contains around the first 400 characters of the post, with HTML and images removed. Full produces a feed that contains everything in the post, including HTML and images. But what about those instances where you want to give your users a taste—an image or two with some introductory text—and then have them visit your blog to see the full post? Well today we’ve launched a third option that lets you do just that using Jump Breaks.

To enable this feature, simply go to the Settings page for your blog, click on Site Feed, and then next to “Allow Blog Feeds”, change the drop-down value to “Until Jump Break”.


That’s it! Next time you write a post and use a jump break, anyone reading the feed will get all the content, including images and HTML formatting, up until the jump break (if there’s no jump break, the feed will contain everything). If readers want to see the full post, they can click the “read more” link and they’ll be directed to your blog. This means you have full control over your feed.  For example, want to include an image for your recipe but not the whole recipe? No problem! Put the image and part of the recipe before the jump break, and that’s all the feed readers will see.

Enjoy!

Guest post by Google Affiliate Network (GAN)

There are lots of great ways to make money from your blog. One of those ways is to use an affiliate network. Put simply, an affiliate network is a way to promote products from some of your favorite retailers; you get paid when any of those retailers makes a sale based on a promotion you ran on your blog. Our friends at the Google Affiliate Network have a great program and have agreed to make a special offer to our users—so if you haven't heard of GAN already, have a read, and be sure to sign up!

With Google Affiliate Network, you can access affiliate ads for top retailers. If the ad or text link you post on your blog results in a sale, you earn a commission. This means that you can start working with advertisers who will pay you a performance fee for driving a sale or other conversion.

Google Affiliate Network gives you access to a diverse range of affiliate programs for advertisers including Barnes & Noble.com, Red Envelope, Sears, ProFlowers, Abe Books and Puma. Once you have access, you can apply to create advertiser programs, promote ads, search for links to specific products, sign up to access product feeds, and utilize Link Subscriptions that deliver the latest links and promotions directly to you each day.

Google Affiliate Network is featured in the Monetize tab in your Blogger account or you can apply using the link below (please note that you’ll need an AdSense ID to join).

Here’s how to get started:
  1. Sign up for a Google Affiliate Network account with your valid AdSense Publisher ID.
  2. As soon as you're approved for Google Affiliate Network, sign in and apply for advertiser programs.
  3. Follow the instructions to start displaying cost-per-action ads.
Check out our Beginner’s Guide to help you through the process of becoming a successful publisher and continue reading for the answers to our frequently asked questions. Apply before December 13th and take advantage of affiliate exclusive holiday offers from select Google Affiliate Network advertisers. The special offers will be available for Monday, December 13th, from over 20 advertisers including Barnes & Noble.com, Sears, Red Envelope, Arden B and 6ave. For more information, please visit this blog post or apply now with your valid AdSense Publisher ID.

Besides an exciting update to the Blogger in Draft testing ground, we’ve also made a few updates to the rest of Blogger. Here’s a quick summary of the latest changes, hot off the press:


Comment Notifications enabled by default on new blogs

We think it’s important to stay in touch with the activity on your blog, so we’ve turned on the comment notification setting by default for all new bogs. We’ll send an email to the  address associated with your Blogger account with each new comment from your readers.

Your old blogs won’t be affected at all, and if you’d like to enable or disable comment notification at any point, you can easily do so from the Settings | Comments tab.


Picasa albums created automatically (if needed)

We hope you are already aware that when you upload an image from Blogger, it gets added automatically your Picasa Web Albums account in an album dedicated to your blog. This means that any image you upload from Blogger will be available to view, edit, and share when you login to Picasa.

Should you delete the album associated with your blog for any reason, we’ve made an update which will now create a new album automatically so you can continue to upload images to Picasa.


Upload Image button added to Edit HTML mode
(Blogger in Draft only)

We heard lots of feedback recently about how you’d like to be able to upload an image in the post editor’s Edit HTML mode, so we’ve added it into the new post editor’s toolbar with today’s release. You’ll see it right now if you go into the post editor. Hopefully this saves you a few extra clicks next time you need to add images to your posts.


And lastly, a bug fix

Many of you let us know via the forum that <img> tags for images uploaded in the new post editor weren’t closing correctly, which was causing formatting problems in your post. We’ve corrected that problem in this release, and now <img> tags are closing as they should.

Thanks for letting us know!

Google Apps users have been asking for Blogger and now, with our recently launched infrastructure improvement, they can use Blogger for free with their Google Apps accounts. We're excited to provide Apps users with this great tool to have their voices heard on the web.

Google Apps is Google's suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration web apps used by more than 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn't gone Google yet, you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration at google.com/apps.

For those Blogger users who have a Google Apps account, if your administrator has already transitioned your organization to the new infrastructure, you can now use Blogger by signing in at blogger.com with your existing Apps account.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services from Google Apps users.

National Cyber-Security Awareness Month is here once again. In that spirit we wanted to share a bit about what we are doing on Blogger to help fight malicious content, along with some tips for a safer browsing experience online. While spammers are always coming up with new tricks, the combination of Blogger’s abuse-fighting systems and the security features of modern browsers helps ensure that you’ll be able to browse through your favorite blog content with confidence.

We’ve partnered with other abuse-fighting teams within Google to develop sophisticated systems for automatically detecting and quarantining nefarious content on Blogspot. Over the years, our teams have analyzed the patterns and behavior of malicious blogs and code, and with each new detection our existing algorithms are trained for better coverage in the future. As a result, we are able to catch and quarantine thousands of malicious blogs each year, and are happy to say that our overall spam levels are at an all-time low across our service.

Of course, while our automated systems provide great coverage for a wide variety of abuse types, you can always let us know about suspicious blogs by reporting them directly to us via our online form. We’re also looking to you, the users, to be our eyes on the web and let us know anything that may have escaped our existing systems.

Beyond partnering with us on the detection process, you can also make a difference in your own online security by taking advantage of your browser’s built-in security. Modern browsers have powerful security features that can detect potentially malicious sites and alert you should you stumble upon them. Using technology like Google’s Safe Browsing tools, users of many browsers see warning screens when attempting to visit sites that automated systems have determined to contain suspicious content. To make sure you have the latest and most secure browser version, please check out the following browser sites:

We also recommend using one of the following tools to keep your browser plug-ins up to date: Google-developed SecBrowsing; Mozilla Plugin Check.

For more tips on safe browsing and security on the web, check out the home of Cyber Security Awareness Month at the http://staysafeonline.org/.

Sometimes returning to a nice, quiet office can be just what the doctor ordered after an exhausting trip away. And for the handful of us on the Blogger Team who just returned from BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, this was definitely the case.

For the first time since the convention’s debut four years ago, we set up shop on the tradeshow floor with our very own Blogger-themed exhibit. Armed with demo stations, Blogger t-shirts and chip clips, and our very own bright red marshmallow couch, we spent our time showing off the latest features and talking to literally hundreds of folks about their experiences with Blogger. And we learned a lot.

shaun, vardhman, chang, antin, brett, and tina on the marshmallow couch.

The feedback that we got was both encouraging and enlightening, and we’re still in the process of digesting everything. First, we want to thank everyone who came by the booth to say hello, test out the new features, spend a few minutes getting interviewed, or to tell us what we could be doing better. Having so many passionate bloggers in one place to interact with was an incredible resource, from the gentleman we spoke with who has been blogging since 1995 to the fitness blogger who set up her first Blogger blog right in front of us. So once again, thanks for sharing!


demoing with the guys from vanilla. photo credit: brendan sera-shriar
We’re excited about what’s in store for Blogger in the coming months, and after this trip we’re even more committed to delivering the best blog service possible. In the spirit of keeping the conversations going, feel free to send us a tweet or post on our wall if something’s on your mind. Or, if you want to give us some more detailed feedback, please let us know on our Product Ideas page.


Finally, we want to thank Rick Calvert for reaching out and encouraging us to be a part of BlogWorld Expo. We hope to see you all next year!


A little over a year ago, we asked all of you to speak your mind and let us know what we could do to make Blogger better. Two thousand ideas and seventy-five thousand votes later, we had quite the laundry list of feature requests and feedback to dig through. Our team took a long, hard look at the data and spent the last year cranking out as many of these features and fixes as humanly possible.


To date, we’re happy to say that we’ve been able to launch most of the top-requested features from the list. Here are just a handful of the features you asked for which are now live:


...and that’s just the beginning of the list. We’re also working on a few big improvements that we’re pretty excited about, so stay tuned as we continue to roll things out of the oven in the near future.

Just as we did last year, we’re asking for your input on our Product Ideas page. As always, our ears are open to your feedback and your input has been invaluable over the years in helping us figure out where to put our time and energy.

Please take a moment to vote on and submit ideas, whether specific feature requests or general service improvements. Think about new features that would make you use Blogger more, the things from other services which may be missing, and even the things which may be frustrating at times. We promise to once again take a long look at the feedback, and hope to tackle many of the top issues just as we did last time around.

Thanks again in advance for all your help making Blogger the best service it can be!

This is a guest post by John Caplan, founder and CEO of OpenSky. OpenSky allows bloggers, including all Blogger users, to discover unique products and sell those on their blogs. As we are interested in helping our users find various ways to monetize their blogs, we’ve asked John to introduce OpenSky for our users. -- The Blogger team


For most of you, writing a blog is about sharing your passion in a way that connects you with others. That’s why Blogger was created -- to help people have their own voice on the web to share that passion.

We at OpenSky want to empower you to share even more with the people who read your blog. We do this by helping you discover great products and giving you the ability to share those products on your blog. Not only will you deepen your relationships with your readers, but you’ll also earn money from every sale.

Most everyone who reads your blog probably loves discovering new products, especially unique items that they wouldn’t find in a giant chain store. And your readers will especially love learning about stuff from someone they trust, like you.

That’s why blogging and product recommendations work so well together.

How OpenSky works

OpenSky is a free platform that empowers you to discover and sell unique products that speak to your passion. So you can hook up your readers with great things they’ll love.

While most affiliate programs draw away your audience, on OpenSky you’ll drive readers to an environment dedicated to you and your products.

For every sale you make we split the profits 50/50, which means you can make up to 4x more than a run-of-the-mill affiliate program. We take care of all the order processing, fulfillment and customer service. You get all the credit.

Sign up now, and discover great new products today.

What People Are Saying About OpenSky

Fast Company described us the best when they said:

"OpenSky may have cracked the code for web publishers and small e-tailers, delivering profits to both while helping consumers with a pain-free shopping experience."

Also, see what The New York Times, LA Times, VentureBeat, TechCrunch have written, or watch this video about us from Good Morning America:



Join us (and start selling) today.

Last month we released two new stats gadgets to the Blogger in Draft testing ground; after hearing your feedback and making a few tweaks, we’re happy to announce that they are both now ready for the main stage. The new-and-improved Popular Posts and Blog’s Stats gadgets can be added to your blog right now from the Gadget Directory by clicking Add a gadget from the Design | Page Elements tab.



Both of these gadgets take advantage of the traffic data that is being collected by Blogger Stats and provide an easy way for you to pass that info on to the readers of your blog.

The Popular Posts gadget will automatically find and display your blog’s posts that have the most pageviews. You can choose whether to display image thumbnails or post snippets in addition to the post title. You can also choose the time window to be used for calculating pageviews and the number of posts you’d like to display.


The Blog’s Stats gadget lets you show off pageview data for your blog, with a handful of configuration options that are easily controlled. You can choose from a variety of styles and display options to suit your blog. We also provide an option to let you select the time window to be used for calculating pageviews.


We hope you enjoy these new gadgets and want to thank you again for your feedback as we fine-tuned them to their current state.

Guest post by Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld & New Media Expo


When the Google Blogger team asked me to write a guest post for the Blogger Blog, I really didn’t know where to start. Today it occurred to me that the story of how I found Blogger might be a good place.

I have been reading and commenting on blogs since the year 2000. I am a news and political junkie so most of the blogs I read were political. Tons of them were hosted right here on Blogger. I was amazed at the original news being reported; the insightful commentary and opinion; the incredibly moving personal stories from Milbloggers and their families and yes the crazy conspiracy theories. This Blogging thing was really incredible. Who were all these smart people?

So many times I wished I could be a blogger, but I wasn’t a techie or a geek and it just seemed like it would be too difficult. Fast forward to 2005; I was in the middle of my two-hour daily commute home on the 91 freeway out of Los Angeles and listening to center right talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt. He said something that got me worked up so I called in. I don’t remember what we talked about but at the end of the conversation he said “you should start a blog.” So that night I went home and Googled “how to start a blog.” Blogger was the first result. So I clicked through and found the message you have all seen and the message that changed my life forever “Create Your Blog Now.” I had no idea how easy it was to start a blog! It only took me five minutes to do something I had been longing to do for nearly five years!

Things started moving very quickly from there—someone actually read my blog. How the heck did they find me? I wondered. Top political bloggers from both sides of the aisle were linking to me. TO ME! Every political pundit I asked to interview said yes! Other bloggers were selling books on their site through Amazon. I thought to myself, I read a lot of books; I should sell the books I like on my blog. A friend helped me sign up as an Amazon Associate and I was off to the races. Then one day an Ad Network contacted me and wanted to sell ads on my blog.

I had so many questions. How much money could I make blogging? How do I add things like widgets and blog rolls to my blog? Can I do audio and video posts? So I started looking for the “Blogging Tradeshow.” Being a tradeshow and conference organizer for the last 15 years I knew there was a tradeshow for every industry. I was stunned when I realized no such conference existed. I asked my blogger friends if they would ever attend the “Blogging Tradeshow.” They all said yes. I asked my tradeshow friends if they thought it was a good idea. They all said yes.

And so BlogWorld & New Media Expo was born in November of 2006. We held our first event in November of 2007 with 1,600 attendees! This October 14-16 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas we will host the fourth annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Over 4,000 bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, internet radio, and TV broadcasters will be attending and things have come full circle.

We are thrilled that for the first time the blog platform that changed my life, Blogger, will be exhibiting at BlogWorld. We have had folks from Blogger speak at the conference every year, and this year Product Manager Chang Kim will be speaking on “The Future of Blogging Platforms.” And now for the first time all of you can visit the Blogger booth (# 308) and ask your own questions. Or just stop by to say hi and meet the Blogger team, or like me stop by and give them a huge THANK YOU for changing your life.

By the way if you still need to register for the show, as a member of the Blogger community you can use this special code for 20% off of any registration package at BlogWorld 2010: BLOGGER20

When it comes to design, sometimes less can be more. This is the mantra behind our newest variant Super Simple, freshly-released to the Template Designer this week. We’ve taken the original Simple variant and stripped it down to the bare essentials, putting your actual blog content front and center on the page.



As with all of our variants, you are free to tweak all of the individual elements and styles to your liking. And if you are looking to design a fancy blog template from scratch, the Super Simple variant is also a great frame to build upon.


You can check out the new variant right now in the Template Designer, under the Simple category. As always, our ears are open to your feedback, so please feel free to let us know what you think.

Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer

We know that personalizing your blog is important. Although you can adjust templates, layouts, backgrounds and more with our Template Designer, you wanted more ways to make your blog completely unique.

Now you can use your own image as your blog background. Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll see the new “Upload image” option, which allows you to select and upload your image. There are a variety of options such as alignment, repeat, and scroll for how to display your new image. This feature is another graduate from Blogger in Draft. You can find more information in our original announcement.



Tips from the Blogger team: If you want a full-screen background, we recommend using an image that's 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, so that the background image can fill the entire screen even for the readers with large monitors. To make sure your blog loads quickly, background images must be small in file size. As the maximum file size you can upload is 300KB, you may need to reduce your photo’s file size using Photoshop, Mac OS X Preview, or one of many free online tools. You can also tile a smaller image, but keep in mind that patterns work better than photographs, which can make your blog look cluttered.

(The good)
(The bad)

This feature is now available on all Blogger blogs and we welcome your suggestions and comments on our Help Forum.

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

Last week we hosted Blogger’s 11th bday celebration, and a huge thanks goes out to everyone who helped us celebrate! Since we were only able to attend a few parties in person (which was awesome!), we enjoyed watching tweets, videos, and photos stream in at #bloggerfiesta. From the four hour conference for 90 people in Manila, Philippines to the three person casual rendezvous at a restaurant in Duluth, Georgia, we heard great stories from around the world about bloggers meeting each other face-to-face.

Even though we’re an internet company, we know the importance of meeting in-person. It provides a great opportunity to learn from others, meet new folks and share tips. We loved that one Fiesta attendee even learned how to set up a custom domain.

While we had some fun of our own last week (particularly in our Sydney office), our favorite stories are the ones you’ve shared. We’ve linked to some of our favorites below. If you have a story from your Blogger Fiesta that you would like to share with us, please send it along to blogger-fiesta@google.com.

Blogger Fiesta Sydney in Google's Sydney office


Posted by Noah Fiedel and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers

Just in time for our eleventh birthday, we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July, Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that's fully integrated with Blogger; you don't need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog’s dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin!



Feature Highlights

Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement; meanwhile, here are some quick highlights for you.
  • Real-time tracking. Each time your blog is viewed, you can see the change on your stats almost immediately
  • Insights about your audience. Top search keywords, countries, browsers, and more
  • Great user interface. Beautiful, easy-to-read graphs and charts

Updates

After our initial launch to Blogger in Draft, we had some very helpful feedback and suggestions from you. Based on them, we’ve made improvements including the following:
  • Self-view exclusion. Some of you wanted Blogger Stats to exclude your own pageviews, and now there’s an option for that: On Stats | Overview, click on the “Don’t track your own pageviews” link (it’s on the right side, under the pageview summary) and select the “Don’t track my pageviews” option. We’re also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin pages and post Preview, providing more accurate pageview data.
  • More effective bot traffic filtering. We’ve made several improvements to detect “bots” (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers) including extending our list of known “bots” to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors.
  • Internationalization. Blogger Stats is now available in more than 40 languages.

We hope you like  Blogger Stats. By the way, there must be something good about August—not only is it our birth month, we’ve gone from four Admin Dashboard tabs to six, just this month alone! (The other new tab we’ve added this month was the Comments tab, which was another highly requested feature.) We still have some more ground to cover, but just wanted to say we’re working really hard to deliver the features you’ve wanted to see on Blogger. Looking forward to seeing you all at the upcoming Meetup!


The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in. And as access to information becomes more widespread and more immediate, the blogosphere is steadily closing that gap. That’s why the Blogger Team is excited to spread the word about Google’s new improvements to Realtime Search, which provide richer and fresher results than ever before.

From the new Realtime Search homepage, you can search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as the happen for instant blog post fodder.

For more information about Realtime’s new features, please visit www.google.com/landing/realtime.

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

It’s only five days away, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are about the 200+ Meetups that are happening around the world. We’re looking forward to your meetups, and seeing your photos, videos, and tweets from the event.

We don’t want to leave the best parties empty-handed, so starting tomorrow we will be sending out some Blogger birthday presents to some of the largest Meetups around the world. We can only send presents to Meetups that have organizers, though, and there’s still lots of fiestas that are organizer-less. It’s super easy and any one can do it, so if you volunteer you may be able to secure presents for your local Meetup.

For those of you who haven’t yet joined one of our Meetups, there’s still time! As a reminder, here’s the important details for the event:


If you have any questions about the Blogger Fiesta Meetups, head over to our official invitation.

We look forward to our first ever global meetups on the 31st!

Posted by Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu, Software Engineers

Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place.


Introducing Comment Spam Filtering

A blog is an open communications system, inviting conversations from all web users. Unfortunately, spammers have been finding their way into these conversations. To fight spam, some of you enabled moderation of all comments or required word verification or login. While somewhat effective, these checks limit real-time conversations around your blog.

To address this, we’ve integrated Google’s spam filtering technologies into the Blogger comment system. Some of you will notice the new “Comments” tab. (Note: We are gradually rolling this out to all users, so some of you may not see the new Comments tab yet.) In the Comments tab, there is a Spam sub-tab that shows all the comments that are likely spam.


The comments in the Spam inbox are not visible to your readers. Here, you can permanently delete spam comments by selecting them and choosing Delete. You can also mark comments as Not Spam that have been incorrectly classified as spam (what we call the “false-positives”). Choose Not Spam and the selected comments will be moved out of the spam list and will be immediately published on your blog.

These feedback actions also help us better identify spam on your blog. We encourage you to occasionally check your Spam inbox to see if any non-spam comments have been marked as spam. Please note that spam filtering currently only applies to new comments.

You can report any issues with our new spam system by clicking on the “Report spam filtering issues” link on the bottom of the Comments | Spam page, or by visiting this Help Forum page.


Comments “Inbox”

We also created a place where you can see all the comments that have been published on your blog. The Comments | Published sub-tab provides a similar view as your email inbox. This view comes in handy when you want to see all of the comments on your blog in one place. With the new comments inbox, it’s easy to find new comments on old posts.



In the Comments | Published sub-tab, you can select comments and mark them as spam or delete them. When you mark a comment as Spam, it will be deleted immediately from your blog. You can also Delete comments for editorial reasons or just Remove Content to leave a record of the comment.

Comment moderation has also moved under the Comments tab and has been extended to allow you to mark comments as Spam.

We hope that adding comment spam filtering and the new “inbox” user interface will be a good starting point toward improving the Blogger commenting system and we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

Last year, Blogger turned ten. We were excited to present you with a (small-but-mighty) bounty of gifts, a token to commemorate all of your contributions over the years.

Now we’re a year older (and would like to think a bit wiser), have some great features under our belt and are ready for another celebration with you, our closest friends. For Blogger’s 11th birthday, we’re hosting the first ever Blogger global birthday party!

We’ll keep it simple—we set the date, you set the parties and Meetup Everywhere will help facilitate (free of charge!). Through the wonder of Meetup Everywhere, you’ll be able to find other bloggers in your area and either join a celebration that has already been set up or start a new party local to you. The goal is to get together in-person, chat about blogging and celebrate with friends you may have otherwise only met online. Meetups can be simple, and no party is too small. Plus, we’ll be supplying each party with a download-able pack of party supplies, including makings for party hats, name tags and signs. And who knows, there may even be other treasures and surprises in store.

Your invitation

  • What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
  • How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
  • Where: Anywhere you are.
  • Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
  • When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
  • RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

How it works

Everything you need is on our BloggerFiesta Meetup site. To find a party near you, do a quick search on the map. To join a scheduled party, click on the I’m Interested button on the party details page. To start a new party, click on Schedule a Meetup near you at the bottom of the BloggerFiesta site.

When you start or join a party, consider volunteering to be the Meetup organizer. Anyone can do it, plus you’ll get fame and glory. That gives you the ability to set the venue and time of the party. Also, don’t neglect the commenting functionality—you can use it to chat and plan with your fellow attendees prior to the party. What you do at the birthday party is completely up to you.

If you want to get started talking about the meet-ups, you can


See you on the 31st! We’ll have our party hats on.

Guest post by Oliver Roup, VigLink CEO


If you spend as much time working on your blog as we do, you wonder if there's a way to get paid. Many bloggers monetize by selling ads on their site but now there is a way to get paid for your actual content rather than just the ads that go around it.

Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word—you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions.

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn.

There are no other costs or fees and nothing changes about how your site looks or behaves. Join VigLink and enroll your blog in less than a minute or learn more by watching this two minute video.




Oliver Roup is the CEO and co-founder of VigLink, a content monetization company backed by Google Ventures.