Blogger Adds +1 Data to Dashboard to Track Popular Posts

This afternoon, Blogger introduced a small update to user dashboards, letting blog owners see how many +1's their content has achieved across the web, including +1's from Google Reader and search results, from your personal dashboard. Now, in addition to traditional statistics familiar to blog authors, like those found in Google Analytics, you can now see a quick + count next to the number of comments and page views - helping show the impact your most popular posts have received.

As I haven't been very active of late on the blog, I haven't done much to deserve +1's from every corner - something I'm looking to get back to doing shortly. But it's fun to see my August announcement of joining the Google+ team got 105 +1's and the Ten Step Guide to Giving Good Social from July also cracked the 100 +1's mark. And working on the Google+ team, I know that as we don't automate +1 activity, every +1 was done by a human being who took the time to show endorsement of my content.

The Addition of +1 data is displayed in the Blogger dashboard.

Watching how many +1s your content gets, and seeing who your most passionate readers are could play a big role in just what you decide to write about in the future - as page views, retweets and likes have. It's a lightweight way to gauge user satisfaction and get a view into your growing community.

Disclosure: I joined Google in August to work on the Google+ team. Blogger is a Google product.

Blogger Enables Static Pages to Link to External Sites

As part of my most recent blog redesign, I added a number of static pages which contain some of my most popular posts, my work history, disclosure badges and event history. Since then, Blogger revamped its publishing back-end, mirroring the design upgrade also seen at Gmail and Google Calendar, as Google extends its recent efforts to enhance the user experience. Somewhere in that mix, I overlooked the added capability to make these static pages not require native content on the blog, as they can also link to external sites. This option was pointed out by George Moga today on his blog, and I've already gone ahead and leveraged his tip.

If you are a Blogger user like I am, you can modify your blog template to include this feature by going to draft.blogger.com. Select "Pages" from your blog's overview section, and then hit "New Page" to make a new page, hosted or linked. There are two options - the first being a "Blank Page" for your own content, and "Web address" for the link itself. Simple.

My List of Static Pages on Blogger, Now With LouisPlus.com.

Linking to LouisPlus.com with a Single URL in Blogger

Recently, I acquired the domain name LouisPlus.com for my Google+ content. To be honest, my good friend Drew Olanoff (who also owns DrewPlus.com) bought it, but he promises he'll let me use it. :) In addition to the Google+ icon in my left sidebar, I've now added a link to LouisPlus.com in the header of my blog, thanks to this new redirect feature. So if you're somebody who wants to link to "My Company", or a social network of your choosing, or really anywhere, it's very simple. No hacking needed.

My Top Ten Favorite Google Products (2011)

Google makes a ton of products. Almost two years ago, thinking about it, I posted my top ten Google products at the time. Google Reader was #1, Blogger was #2 and FeedBurner was #3. Since then, G+ has come into play, I switched to Android and Chrome is on fire. It's time for a rewrite.

The Original Post from Sept. 2009: My Top Ten Favorite Google Products

Here's what I would list now. Eager to hear your own top 3, 5, or even 10.

1. Google+ (Obviously, this is my start page, I am here constantly)
2. Android (The mobile OS runs my favorite tablets and phones)
3. Google ChromeOS (Living in the cloud is a game changer)
4. Blogger (The easiest, most flexible and stable blogging platform)
5. Google Reader (Still the best place to follow hundreds of sites in one place)
6. Google Search (The gold standard for finding anything)
7. Gmail (Finally my default email, and archive. Buzz is a plus.)
8. FeedBurner (Takes my blog to the rest of the Web, powered by Pubsubhubbub)
9. Google Voice (Syncs my phone to the Web with auto-blocking of spam calls)
10. YouTube (If it happened and is worth watching, it's here. Now with movies too!)

Things have obviously changed in just two years. Android, ChromeOS, Google Voice and Google+ were not on my radar much only a short time ago, and now they're essential. Curious to your own insight and what major services (Analytics, Maps, Earth, etc.) I missed.

/via my Google+ Profile.

Blogger Revamps User Interface, Cleans Up Nice

In the most dramatic overhaul of its blog publishing layout and interface since I switched to Blogger five years ago, the Google-owned service introduced its previously announced interface redesign this afternoon, bringing a high quality look and feel that catches the product up to the many other Google products that have recently undergone UI upgrades, including Gmail and Google Calendar, following the launch of Google +1 last week. The update, now visible to all Blogger users at the Blogger In Draft site (http://draft.blogger.com) surfaces a new statistically-driven dashboard complete with accumulative page views and post counts, and underneath the hood, a new array of icons that match the many different ways bloggers interact with their sites, including new posts (such as this one), static pages, comments, complete with moderation, detailed visit statistics, and UI tweaks to layout and design.

The new layout also promises an "Earnings" tab that will replace the monetization feature, when used in companion with Google's popular AdSense product. (Mine of course remains at a massive $0.00)

The New Blogger In Draft Dashboard

The cascade of improved UIs in Google's products hasn't missed Blogger, so recently rumored, but not confirmed, to be getting a planned name change by other tech blogs earlier this week. Blogger also announced today the addition of a new product manager, Bruce Polderman, giving team three. So don't believe anything that might otherwise tell you this product is going on the backburner as far as Google is concerned.

Blogger In Draft Statistics

Beyond the smarter and more appealing UI in managing posts and statistics, the post editor portion of Blogger is significantly improved as well, giving authors an entire screen to work with in creating their posts, looking much like a Word Processing document, with a standard formatting bar on the top, and post settings, including labels and scheduling, on the right. It makes all previous versions, including the many versions of WordPress I've tried look as clunky as late 1990s era Word for Macintosh ports. The new design of Blogger is very smooth and appealing, so if you are on Blogger, and don't tend to use the Blogger In Draft feature as I do, it's highly recommended.

Blogger Layouts In the New Interface

Blogger's integration with other Google properties, such as Picasa and Google+ also makes the platform more appealing, as you can post photos taken from your phone, sent by Instant Upload, and add them to your blog. And yes, this post was made using ChromeOS, giving the Blogger Web interface a real run for its money.

Don't Fear Being Fireballed or Slashdotted if on Blogger

It can be difficult to plan for an unanticipated spike in Web traffic. One of the most amusing parts of reading Macolyte John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog is the near certainty that at least once per day, one of the poor saps he links to goes down due to the resulting crush of curious onlookers. It happens so frequently that it's practically second nature to see him update a post saying the link has been "Fireballed", opting instead to point to Google's cache of the original. This phenomenon, of course, is not a Gruber exclusive. For years, otherwise innocent bloggers have been Slashdotted, TechCrunched or even Scobleized, seeing their sites crack under pressure. But from what I can tell, if you're hosted on Blogger, this isn't an issue at all. The company was just recognized for perfect uptime during a survey by Royal Pingdom, and I've seen my own site spike in traffic following controversial posts with no ill effects.

Blogger was not always known for a stellar uptime record. In late 2006, the service practically had to write "a novel" about continued outages. In fall of 2007, I railed against Google for ignoring users during another major outage. But services mature and times change.

Royal Pingdom's Downtime Report. Blogger Scores a Zero.

With the backdrop of Tumblr's highly-publicized downtime of more than a day earlier this month, Royal Pingdom also spotted occasional outages at WordPress, TypePad and Posterous, each of whom looked great compared to Tumblr's unfortunate blip, but not as spotless as the often overlooked Blogger.

Getting Slashdot, Scoble and Spiegel Bumps Simultaneously

While escaping system-wide downtime is a major win in itself, that doesn't speak to the services' ability to scale under pressure. Gruber recommends the WP Super Cache Plugin for WordPress, letting users serve more than a page a second, as it's self-hosted WordPress blogs that often get crushed with one of his links. But I've been linked from Daring Fireball a few times and lived to tell the tale. Same for Slashdot, Techmeme, Hacker News and the Huffington Post, all of which are capable of sending solid and sustained traffic on good days.

Techmeme, Hacker News and Scoble Don't Bring Down Blog

Similar to how Google is well known for its Web site never going down, I have to assume Blogger has mastered Google's distributed architecture, and makes no single blog, or its hotspotting, an instrument for failure. This blog didn't slow or go down when tens of thousands of visitors dropped by this July to tell me I was an idiot for switching from iPhone to Android. It also didn't go down when I questioned the usefulness of Google Wave last year, or when the Huffington Post liked my recap of David Kirkpatrick's Facebook Effect.

Not Even Daring Fireball Could Take the Blog Down

Even the largest services have occasional downtime. Facebook was down last week, intentionally, due to a code push ahead of schedule. Twitter has had its share of bumps, though the site has gotten much better in the last year, and even Facebook subsidiary FriendFeed went down this weekend. But Blogger users are sitting pretty knowing their blogs are going to be up and responsive, even under pressure.

Google's Blogger Introduces Mobile Templates In Beta

In the seemingly never-ending battle between Google's Blogger and Wordpress for the supreme full-featured blogging platform, Wordpress has long had a big lead in terms of presenting a high quality experience on mobile devices. While Blogger simply laid out the site's standard layout on your small screen, expecting you to pinch to zoom or read extremely tiny text, WordPress blog owners could smugly serve up simplified versions of their blog for readers on the go. Today, that gap is gone, as Blogger has introduced, in beta, the first mobile templates for the platform, which are drop dead simple to start using immediately.

Available in the Blogger In Draft version of the platform, users are prompted to "make your blog look great" on mobile devices. If you choose to optimize your feed for mobile, instead of showing the standard layout, simply turn them on and click "Yes." A handy QR code sits next to the decision if you would like to preview just how your site now looks on the mobile platform.

You Can Now Optimize Blogger for Mobile Devices

Just Click Yes, and You're Optimized. That's It!

As you can assume, with millions and millions of Android and iPhone devices out there, as well as scads of feature phones, mobile browsing of the Web is becoming an increasingly important and relevant part of a publisher's experience, so there is tremendous value to optimizing for the small screens as well as the big ones, and now Blogger users, myself included, are no longer on the outside looking in.



   
The Blogger Experience On Mobile Devices

Once enabled, visiting the blog URL lays out the recent stories in a simple vertical stack, where clicking the right arrow opens up a single post in the mobile view. At the footer of each post, you see applied labels, with the option to return "Home" to the main screen or go to an "Older Post". And should the reader prefer, they can click "View Web version" to see the original.

A Common Question to Non-Optimized Blogger Users

This update, much anticipated, much awaited, is absolutely welcome. Now I won't get grumpy users asking why I haven't optimized my site for mobile instead of RSS.

Blogger Rolls Out Real-Time Stats for All Users

Initially targeted as one of the launches included in the service's 10-year anniversary, Blogger tonight introduced integrated Web statistics for its users that rival the more robust Google Analytics, but are simple to manage, and update in near real-time, giving the millions and millions of blogs that rely on Blogger greater insight into their visitor traffic, including top pages, referral data, browser data, and their country of origin.

Like you would expect from any good analytics package, the new offering displays popular search keywords to find out what your visitors are looking for, as well as showing you peaks and valleys in your daily traffic.

Blogger Stats Display Analytics for Every Blog In Real-Time

Top Pages Displayed In Blogger's Stats

The new stats package is available in the service's Blogger In Draft mode, under the "Stats" tab for all users, with no required code to install, or configuration. For those looking for deep details in analytics, including bounce rates, campaigns and ad conversions, Google Analytics is clearly more detailed, but the Blogger statistics are rapidly accessible and bring the information to the users every time they log in.

Pageviews are Cut By Time, Shown In Aggregate

If you're a Blogger user, make sure to draft.blogger.com and click stats to see for yourself.

Siobhan Quinn Exits Blogger, Checks In at Foursquare

After seven years at Google, including the last two and a half as a product manager on the company's Blogger platform, Siobhan Quinn handed in her badge yesterday, and will start on June 7th as the first product manager at the fast-growing, location obsessed, Foursquare, in New York City, joining head of product Alex Rainert. Siobhan is the second of Blogger's three product managers to have recently made a move, following Rick Klau's move to manage Google Profiles last month. I talked with Siobhan today to find out her thoughts on Foursquare's potential, and how the company can transition from one beloved by "Silicon Valley nerds" to a more mainstream audience, delivering real value.

Siobhan initially joined Google in 2003 as part of the Google Accounts team before Accounts had launched, predating even the launch of GMail (in April of '04). She says she worked on the front-end to Accounts, the sign-in system, and new account flow, helping to connect accounts to many of Google's other properties, including Adwords, personalized search, Google Checkout and, of course, Blogger. But she admitted she hasn't written code in a few years, and has been working to push Blogger from its relatively slower pace of updates to one that has seen increased activity, including the recent launch of the Blogger Template Designer and last week's launch of new Webfonts, with a corresponding API.

"That's why I am excited to leave now," she said. "I made an impact on Blogger, and I've been at Google for 7 years. It is time to do something much different."

How different? Siobhan is leaving a company of 20,000 employees to one of just a hair over 20. Foursquare has gained a lion's share of attention in the tech blogosphere for its checkin application, but in reality, the team remains extremely small. And while many of us have blended our interest in Foursquare with a mixture of curiosity and skepticism, she makes a compelling case for the future of the product - as the platform morphs from one focused on badges and gaming to one more centered on reviews and tips from your social graph.

Siobhan postulates that Foursquare tips can become a lot more useful as more people use the service, and start to fill in the system's data, even with what I've always thought were the mundane check-ins as gas stations, fast food restaurants, office buildings, or parks.

"We can make tips a lot more useful," she said. "For example, if you are looking for a dentist in your town, and people in your social graph have reviewed a dentist near you and checked in three times this year, that's powerful for me. That's the dentist I would want to go to. Combining checkins and reviews and your social graph would be a powerful demand generation tool."

For many Foursquare users, the fun in using the application has come from gaining mayorships and accumulation of brightly colored badges. As I joked maybe Foursquare would be moving to offer vice mayorships, deputy mayorships and other titles, she agreed that "there need to be more opportunities for users to win", adding "the mayor should be able to set some laws. Maybe the mayor can design the drink special."

Beyond the recommendation and tip aspect from connected friends within the Foursquare social graph, businesses have many opportunities to leverage checkin activity that hasn't yet been tapped, she said. While Starbucks gained good visibility for offering $1 off Frappuccinos for the store's mayors nationwide, their efforts are the exception and not the rule today.

"If you're at Wendy's and you get three other people to check in with you, maybe you get a free meal," Siobhan suggested. "And then, maybe that makes the restaurant trend and become the hotspot to be. For users who are not in the geeky, trendy, Silicon Valley area, and are offered incentives to add reviews and checkins, they could be included to do that."

Her last role at Blogger centered around many people bringing their offline lives online, and sharing their stories. But Foursquare has the power to impact offline behavior, as friends seek out friends and experiment with new venues - practically a 180 degree turn.

"Foursquare is making people explore a little more and step outside their comfort zone," she said. "I like any product that makes people's lives more meaningful offline. It encourages you to explore and try new things away from your computer."

Siobhan doesn't have much time between now and her first day at Foursquare HQ - giving her just over a week to pack, sell her car and furniture, and head to New York with her dog in tow. Siobhan (according to her Foursquare profile) is mayor of ME Cabo in Cabo San Lucas, but hasn't claimed any Bay Area properties. Maybe New York will bring her more luck. Until she starts logging checkins on the East Coast, you can find her on Twitter at @siobhanquinn.

Meanwhile, Blogger remains in the hands of Chang Kim, who joined the team after Google acquired his company, TNC, in September of 2008.

10 Suggestions for Redesigning the Google Profile

Have you looked at your Google profile lately? (Here's mine) Pretty boring, right? Just a white page with a bunch of blue links, like much of the rest of Google? You might not look at your Profile all that often, but with Profiles being discoverable in Google Search and made more central to your online activity with the introduction of Buzz, it's possible that this page could be a major hub for your personal presence on the Web. Given the recent addition of Rick Klau to the team, it's clear Google wants to get this product right. It's also a great opportunity to give Rick and his entourage a little helpful advice. So here's what I would do if I got the opportunity to design the ultimate Google Profile:

1. Unhook Buzz from GMail and Open a Dedicated Buzz Site

This one is screamingly obvious - and something I anticipate to be a near-certainty, unless the criticism of Buzz had Google reconsidering its focus, which I don't think it will. If Buzz and Profile are to be paired, there has to be a way to get to Buzz on its own domain, outside of my e-mail. This, I believe, would dramatically raise engagement and ease of access. As each Buzz user's entry and comments link back to their profile, this in turn raises the visibility of the Profile itself.

2. Enable the Option to Remove Buzz Without Killing Your Profile

A corollary to the above is that in order to completely opt out of Buzz and disable it completely is that you need to delete your Google Profile too. That's crazy. That's almost punitive judgment for somebody who doesn't see things the Google way. That Buzz and Profiles are connected in the same way that Facebook's News Feed and Facebook's Profiles are connected is one thing, but to require the deletion of one to unlink the other should be fixed immediately.

3. Add the Ability To Import One's LinkedIn Resume to Google Profiles

Today, Google Profiles asks you where you've previously worked, but it's scarcely an inch deep. I would want the option to import my LinkedIn profile, complete with titles, companies and summaries, and be able to display that in a tab called "My Career", "Work" or "Professional". Of course, for those who don't have existing LinkedIn resumes, the option would be to populate this tab from scratch, but have it display on Google.

While this would not immediately gain you the relationship and recommendation portion of LinkedIn, it could easily be a new place for your online resume.

4. Introduce an Ability to Customize the Google Profile With Templates

The look and feel of today's Google Profiles is extremely sterile. Like many other Google properties, the wisdom has been data over design, and users don't have much, if any, opportunity to tailor the content in the way they would like. Rick Klau, having just watched fellow PM Siobhan Quinn launch Blogger's new Template Designer, would do well to tap into that option, giving people more ownership of how they are presented online. In fact, Rick's quote: "How you express yourself online is a lot more than just a blog," from the interview we had on the day he announced the move, hints that he feels the same way.

I would want the option to change background colors, sidebar designs and reformat the page's elements - things that even Facebook gives you little opportunity to do - but others have done well.

5. Think Global, Act Mobile

All the trends are pointing toward increased Web consumption on our mobile devices, be they Android, iPhone or some other variety. Facebook's iPhone application has gained tremendous traction and is quite usable. Buzz was designed with mobile in mind. However, Google Profiles simply scrunch the text down in a small way for a smaller screen. It wouldn't hurt to have Profiles recognize mobile browsers and provide a superior mobile experience.

6. Highlight My Streams By Category - Like Status Updates!

Google Profiles do a good job of featuring links out to other third-party services where I participate. If I register dozens of social sites, and you know I have them, these disparate icons will litter the right side of my Profile. But like MyBlogLog and FriendFeed, the icons themselves don't tell a story. The story comes from the content being created at each of those sites. While some of my streams might be flowing through my Buzz tab, I should also be able to choose to share my Tweets, native FriendFeed updates or GChat status updates on my profile, as a lifestream, in a "Status Updates" tab in my profile, which would show the most recent shares at the top. Similarly, if you have multiple photo site accounts, you could pull in the latest updates from Flickr, Smugmug and Picasa in a tab called "Photos".

7. Raise the Visibility of Contact Information, and Remove the Tab

Today, my Google Profile says my name, my title, and features my latest status update at the top, generated through GMail's GChat feature - and even that status message is not visible to anyone who is not a connected "chat buddy". The contact information I have provided, including e-mail, phone, and address, optionally posted by me, is tucked behind a tab. If I have opted to make this information public, it should have higher visibility, and could easily take the spot where the bulky status message is today.

8. Reduce The Automatic Behavior and Placement of Photos

In today's Google Profile, your title and avatar are immediately underwritten with a strip of photos. It's a cool feature, to be sure, but their is no option to put them somewhere else, to resize them, to add any relevant information about photos, etc. If photos are not something I think should be a lead part of my experience, then I would want to minimize their focus, or even tuck them behind one of the tabs at my disposal. Today, these photos pull from Flickr, Picasa, or from other hand-entered photo streams, but they all look the same - disconnected and unrelated.

Facebook has become the king of photo uploads not just because of the network's relevance and reach, but also thanks to the option to leave comments on these photos, or to tag other people. Google Profiles do nothing but link out, making the photos vestigal. Unless Google wants us to upload photos directly to our Profiles, they should get lower visibility.

9. Sidewiki Doesn't Deserve the High Profile on My Profile

Sidewiki entries are one of the four tabs on my Profile today. I've made one Sidewiki entry, ever, and while it may have been a good one, it certainly doesn't rate equally with my "About" and "Contact" sections, yet it gets the same billing. That's silly. And for whatever reason, I cannot remove Sidewiki from my profile within my profile settings. It's impossible. If you're a huge Sidewiki fan, then sure, add it, but it shouldn't be there automatically.

10. Modular Permissions By Section

Google's default approach, and mine, is to make content visible to all, so that it is indexable and discoverable. If we have learned anything from the tumult around Buzz's entry to the marketplace, it is that one size does not fit all when it comes to public content vs. private content. But today, I don't even have the option to make my Gmail chat messages public if I wanted to, and others don't have the option to provide comments on their Google Reader shares to the public, but only invited friends. In reverse, if I chose to, I should be able to hide my photos from the public, or any other item, making that only visible to synchronous friends. If this can be managed in a simple way, it could go a long way to getting people comfortable in providing even more personal information to a company that already knows a lot about us.

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Have you given a lot of thought to your Google Profile? I see this as a key weapon in Google's assualt on Facebook. More on that soon, of course. What else would you do to make this a better product?

Google's Blogger PM Rick Klau Moves to Google Profiles

Prior to their integration with Google Buzz, individual Google Profiles have not had a high level of visibility, falling fairly low on the social ecosystem ladder when contrasted with more siloed services, including Twitter and Facebook. Yet, as Google looks to further integrate social elements into their platform, it appears that Profiles will play an ever-greater role in how both individuals and companies represent themselves online. Today, Profiles snagged a notable convert, adding Rick Klau, a product manager for Google's Blogger platform, to the team.

Klau, who joined the Blogger team in 2008 following Google's acquisition of FeedBurner the previous year, has largely been the service's public face - playing a visible role in the company's feature roll-outs around Blogger's 10th anniversary, which took place in late 2009, and more recently, tackling the challenge of migrating a large installed base of users off FTP-hosted blogs - which proved to be taxing, even for a company with the resources of Google. Klau served as one of now three Blogger product managers, accompanied by Siobhan Quinn, a 7-year Google veteran, and Chang Kim, based in Seoul, Korea, who joined the team after Google acquired his company, TNC, in September of 2008.

Rick's New Home At Google Profiles

In a conversation I had with Rick this afternoon, day one of his time on the Profiles team, he said the move was the result of a "confluence of need and opportunity". Assuming increased importance for Profiles over time, this role may mean direct impact on a swelling number of Google users, not just those who blog, and appears to be another step in Google's march to becoming a more social company.

"With the Buzz launch, and an increased focus of getting social right, this was a huge opportunity where we weren't doing as much as we could," Rick said.

Rick said that even prior to the Buzz integration with Profiles, the product gained more prominence thanks to Google Profiles results being displayed in core Google search results. This makes the content on your own profile increasingly more important, whether Buzz succeeds or falls flat. And similar to the work on Blogger, he saw an opportunity to let users be more creative in terms of how they were represented, but in a new place.

"How you express yourself online is a lot more than just a blog," Rick said. "We want to give people an option for how they are presented in that context."

To spread more light on the transition, and what this means for Google's properties, both Blogger and Profiles, I interviewed Rick this afternoon using CinchCast. He was gracious enough to participate, and the conversation is embedded below.





You can find all my CinchCast recordings, including this one, at http://www.cinchcast.com/louisgray. Also, Rick has now posted on the news on his blog: New role - Google Profiles

Blogger Intros Highly Customizable Template Designer

In what the company called Blogger's biggest announcement in several years, Google introduced a versatile template designer this morning that opens up a wide array of creative high-quality designs to the millions of users on the platform. The launch comes in the wake of Blogger's 10th anniversary, and raises the bar in terms of both appearance and ease of customization, guiding Blogger users to leverage new professionally designed themes with thousands of background images, and customization on layout and color themes. The combined package could mean the end of flat-looking Blogger templates, and gives potential WordPress users or switchers a serious alternative.

The new Blogger Template Designer, which launched on Blogger In Draft, features 15 new professional templates at introduction, with more to come, including anticipated user submissions, customized layouts with up to three columns, hundreds of background images via a partnership with iStockphoto, and the ability to change colors and fonts across the site. The package, which I will definitely be messing around with shortly, is an effort to give everyone their own personal look and feel that doesn't appear to be "cookie cutter".

Blogger's New Template Designer In Action

"How people look on the Web is really important, especially if it comes to publishing or blogging," said Siobhan Quinn, a product manager of Blogger at Google yesterday. "We wanted to empower people to create their own unique design, with tools that are extremely simple and powerful at the same time. We believe the blog is your blog, and you should be able to do anything you want with it."

Prior to this morning's launch, the vast majority of existing Blogger templates were created by or impacted by Google's then visual design lead Doug Bowman in 2005. With Doug now at Twitter for a year, and the templates looking somewhat stale, not to mention difficult to parse in HTML (trust me), it is high time for new designs.

Blogger Template Designer's Image Picker

Blogger Template Designer's Layout Tab

The introduction of a few dozen templates for Blogger wouldn't be that much of a big deal, except for the fact the company has leveraged the engineering talent at Google, and applied that to its new design options. As was explained yesterday, every template can be applied to every available site layout, and if users opt to tilt their blog toward one specific color theme or another, care is taken to make sure the text and images are not only readable, but look good.

Blogger Template Designer's Advanced Tab Options

This customization leverages a new concept of a "main color theme" which as Quinn explained, "lets you shift from one complementary set to another, with an infinite number of palettes in the color spectrum."

Blogger users who tap into these new designs will get the option to modify the existing templates through a Layout tab that lets them apply any template to any layout, including 8 body layouts and 3 footer layouts. You can even adjust the width of any column to get customization down to the pixel. As the sidebars are edited, they present different "drop regions" for Gadgets you may have installed. And if you want to get into the code, there is always the option to muck with the HTML to make it yours. Should you want to add a customized CSS file, you can add that as well, and even remove it later without seeing your blog fall apart, as Blogger uses your code to override their own, not deleting it outright.

With tens of millions of Blogger blogs out there, even if Google offered hundreds of pre-made templates, they would still be recognizable as Blogger hosted. Now, if Blogger users do revamp their blogs with the new Blogger Template Designer, they can take on the author's personality in a new way. Watch this space, as I may be leveraging them myself shortly.

Blogger and Google Reader Speed Up, Suggestions Improve

Two of the major outlets where I produce content and consume content, both from Google, took steps forward on Thursday, as Blogger announced new improvements to load slow-performing pages more quickly, and Google Reader unofficially made a big move, with the likely addition of Pubsubhubbub support, which makes the service real-time enabled both incoming and outgoing. Meanwhile, in a separate announcement, Reader promised improved recommendations for you to find new sources to follow - including similar sites per feed.

I've been talking up Pubsubhubbub for months now, because it is the engine that is playing an ever-increasing role in pushing my data faster and faster from site to site. Google Reader shares had already been powered by Pubsubhubbub to flow downstream, but it had been widely assumed Google Reader was not using the same kind of lightning speed to get updates as blog posts were added. Starting today, Jesse Stay and others figured out they had flipped the switch.

An Instant Update from Posting to Reader

As others confirmed, and I saw later also, posts that used to take upwards of half an hour to hit Reader, without manual polling, were there practically instantly, showing 0 minutes to 2 minutes of delay. With FeedBurner also Pubsubhubbub enabled, there should be no latency between when I hit the publish button, and the posts hitting FriendFeed, Buzz Twitter and Reader all at once now.

Google has recently been talking a lot now about making page load times a more important element of how they are ranked in the company's search engine. This leads to the next announcement, from Blogger, who says that traditionally slow-loading pages, including label pages and archive pages, are now going to auto paginate these pages to deliver speedier load times in the browser. They are guessing not only will pages load more quickly, but total page views will go up. Always a good thing.

Reader Puts Me In Good Company

Recommendations from Coding Horror

Reader's move to Pubsubhubbub was likely part of a larger code push from the team, which did announce improved recommendations for new feeds. Now, in addition to tailored recommendations for you, you can click any feed and see what they believe are similar sites. For example, I found that Reader finds me most like Lifehacker, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, GigaOM and Walt Mossberg. All very cool recommendations. I also found out that Reader finds Loic LeMeur's blog to be most similar to TechCrunch, Seth Godin's blog, Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble. I doubt Loic is complaining either.

The amazing thing about this new feature? It was my #1 request way back in March of 2007. It took almost three years, but it's finally here, and I'm going to spend some time finding new sources to follow.

Hard But Smart Decisions: Blogger Tackles The .5% Problem

One of the most difficult decisions a product manager can make is one that could possibly negatively effect a loyal, but very small, population of users. Whether it be the reaching of a crossroads around supporting a legacy product or feature, or finding far too many engineering resources are spent with little or no return, it can be tempting to refuse compromise and continue foolhardily ahead, trying to be all things to all people. But sometimes, it is smarter to draw a line in the sand, and make a decision. With a proper amount of foresight and communication, the impact can be reduced, and for the most part, the potential tsunami can be reduced to a mere trickle.

Quietly, on Friday afternoon, Google's Blogger division pre-announced the group's plan to phase out support for FTP publishing to the service. The company explained that FTP publishing in Blogger will be unsupported after March 26th, and the service is working in the interim to provide a simplified migration tool for impacted users, as well as a dedicated blog and help documentation, extending beyond what promises to be an "all hands on deck" approach from the team's members.

Blogger, widely considered to be the largest blogging network in the world, has at times been seen to trail competitors in capability and features, even as the service has more recently introduced a comparative barrage of new options in the last few months, coinciding with its ten year anniversary. As product manager Rick Klau communicated, the team has seen a drain on resources which has impacted the ability to improve Blogger beyond its current state, and much of that drain has been from a .5% share of users who have relied on FTP.

Without going too much into detail on the technical side, it is clear that among Google's strengths in its array of services is the ability to scale and have no bottlenecking, including dynamic access to content from an array of servers. As a recently converted FTP Blogger user, I know the experience I had on the FTP site was less robust and less dynamic than the Google experience I've long been used to. Switching, though a non-trivial process last fall, which also saw me migrate from www.louisgray.com to blog.louisgray.com, has been nothing but good news for me since, with greater access to all the new Blogger features, and near-instant publishing without outages that used to plague the FTP service. (See: Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours from June of 2008)

Having worked for the past decade plus with technology companies who have seen significant upgrades from product generation to product generation, there come times when you have to announce the end of life for a first generation product, or make it clear that a specific software release is code complete, and won't move forward with the rest of the family. This can seem like the end of the world as an individual, especially at first, but, as part of the bigger picture, it is almost always the right idea, or else you suffer from a never-ending engineering drain and endless testing for compatibility ahead of feature leadership. A good example of this that most can remember was when Apple announced work on Mac OS 9 was complete, and the rest of the world moved to Mac OS X, laggers be darned.

Klau's post promises "a number of big releases planned in 2010", many of which would no doubt be available only to those users not using FTP. In order for Blogger to move forward, they know they need focus and they are starting the process by talking to a vocal, non-trivial minority of folks who should be learning in the next few weeks how they can make the change and what that means for their future. While some may say they are fed up with Blogger and find themselves staring at a new WordPress install, Blogger is doing the right thing by taking a hard choice and looking ahead to the future. (See also: Rick Klau: Turning Off Blogger FTP)

I hope to be talking a bit more on this with the Blogger team and look forward to seeing their new announcements. If you are a Blogger user on FTP now and see this news as the end of the world, let's talk about it. I survived, and it looks like it should be even easier for you.

The Top 15 Stories on LouisGray.com in 2009

Ever since I stopped doing my monthly summaries on blog statistics, as some had judged them as internal navel gazing and self-gratification, I haven't talked much about statistics and numbers, hits, page views or visitors. But in the interest of sharing, and wrapping up the year 2009, I thought I would expand on my yearly summary post from last week and show just what visitors were looking for that drove traffic. In aggregate, I should mention that total traffic in the year was not dramatically higher than 2008, which I take to mean more people read the content via RSS or in aggregators. In addition, there were fewer posts on the site in 2009 than in 2008, thanks to reduced guest posts.

The Top 15 stories authored in 2009, in order of highest traffic to least:

1. Google Wave Hits Shore. Flash Flood Warning In Effect.
October 1, 2009

The summary of my initial reactions to Google Wave was surprisingly visible. Although I felt as if my thoughts were actually late to the game, the post ended up being far and away the highest trafficked article of the year. The spike was led by Robert Scoble posting how much he thought Wave was overhyped. Subsequently, someone posted our pair of posts to Slashdot, and Der Spiegel of Germany also highlighted the summary. Although I was not overly negative of Wave, I did say it was very busy, and my reaction often got lumped in with Robert's much more critical response.

2. 40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media
January 5, 2009

At the beginning of the year, Mike Fruchter wrote an extremely detailed guide on the necessary tools required to be engaged in social media. His effort was rewarded through the post being among the most bookmarked on Delicious, and being highlighted by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Mike is one of those talents that I hope to be working alongside someday, should I ever get the chance.

3. The Story of Google's Closure: Advanced JavaScript Tools
November 8, 2009

When Google released Closure tools to the Web, response to this was fairly neutral. Most folks tended to just repeat the news. But I thought it made more sense to ask Google developers how they had benefited from the tool while in house. Mihai Parparita of Google Reader gave a wonderful first person account of his use, and other geeks appreciated it. It was featured on Hacker News.

4. FTC Disclosures Made Simple For Bloggers With Conflicts
December 4, 2009

Among my most fun posts of the year was a collaboration with Jeannine Schaeffer earlier this month on some icons to help bloggers disclose relationships to the FTC. It was a fun idea, and Jeannine came through in a big way. Mashable and others highlighted the story, and I've enjoyed seeing the humorous icons make their way around the Web in the weeks since.

5. Facebook Drops the Walled Garden, Opens Up Possibility for Track
March 16, 2009

Jesse Stay, a preeminent expert on both Twitter and Facebook, highlighted Facebook's increased openness and the ability to let updates leak into Google and the wider Web at large. He is the author of multiple books on Facebook worth checking out if you ever want to write Facebook apps or just learn more about the largest social network in the world.

6. Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken
May 21, 2009

As Twitter has grown well beyond initial expectations, the service's fragility has shown in a number of ways. Among the most visible has been the disappointing index from the company's search engine. It's now widely known that the engine only goes back a few days, and it doesn't index some of the most visible accounts, making data discovery and retention difficult. It would be wonderful if this were to be solved in 2010.

7. Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?
October 29, 2009

At risk of having to throw away my Apple fanboy card, I became more entranced by Google in 2009, thanks to the company releasing solid product after solid product, many of which competed head to head for my attention with Apple's well-known suite of offerings, including iLife and the iPhone. The more I thought about it, the more realistic I thought about switching, and I am definitely watching this space closely.

8. What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users
January 2, 2009

At the beginning of the year, seeing a lack of growth on FriendFeed's part that met my own aggressive expectations, I gave some unsolicited feedback as to how I thought the company could improve. They had other ideas, and launched many great tools, but didn't go the way I had thought. Months later, they were absorbed into Facebook.

9. The Newest Annoyance on Twitter: Follow and Refollow Spam
March 7, 2009

Twitter's problems weren't limited to their own back-end infrastructure. Users often got tired of being bombarded by different types of spam, either on the service itself, through direct messages, or through what I found as refollow spam. Some automated accounts were following my account every few hours to get in front of me and my connections. This annoyance was thwarted in time.

10. iPhone Call Recording: It Makes Too Much Sense Not to Do
August 9, 2009

While BlogTalkRadio's CinchCast product has largely filled this need, it seems to me that Apple could easily enable us to record phone call conversations for interviews and podcasts. So far, my understanding is that applications posted to the iTunes Store that accomplish this very thing have been slowed or stopped outright.

11. How To Cleanly Separate Personal and Work Social Media Personalities
March 22, 2009

Many people are looking for a way to act in social media on behalf of their company, while maintaining their own personality. Having accomplished this myself, I thought I would share how. It seems many others were curious and this post remained popular and shared through the second half of the year.

12. Blogger Quietly Turns Ten, Plans Slew of Feature Upgrades
August 23, 2009

As one Blogger holdout who hasn't moved to WordPress, I watch the platform closely, and Blogger turned ten years old this fall, without fanfare. Following my quick summary, this surprisingly hit the front page of Digg (only my second time ever), which was appreciated, but befuddling, as it was not a huge story, in my opinion.

13. Hi Facebook, It's Me, FriendFeed. This Relationship? It's Complicated.
August 10, 2009

The announcement that Facebook acquired FriendFeed struck the many people who like FriendFeed in a very personal way. I have talked to many top users of the site who felt as if the announcement had hit them emotionally, as no other simple merger or acquisition had before. Much of the concern lies in the fact that Facebook has a reputation that runs contrary to what some hoped FriendFeed would become. My amusing tongue in cheek response tried to explain just how we were feeling, rather than encapsulating the news like many other sites already had.

14. Feedly Explore Highlights Recommended Blogs, Reader Activity
September 26, 2009

Feedly, a 2008 debut here, has been among the most popular ways to get RSS updates. The service's Explore feature enhanced feed discovery. After posting this piece it was highlighted within Feedly and many users came to the blog to see what was new.

15. Twitter Caps Following Limits, Denting Auto-Follow Services
April 20, 2009

In a year I wrote many good things about Twitter, it's no surprise the more negative stories gained traction. Among them was a move that blocked some Twitter developers from using advanced auto-follow tools, reducing the option for some accounts to be automated.

In a year with more than 500 posts (the fourth straight above 500), these 15 top ones showed me that people are always eager to learn more about Google and Twitter, and how to best use these social media tools. While I don't let traffic define what I intend to cover, it's always worth making sure I keep on topic for what the readers want to see.

The Blog's Place In A World of Microblogging: Not Dead Yet!

Even as the microblogging space seems to be white hot these days, the world of longer-form blogging is still seeing impressive growth, with all major blogging platforms showing greater than 20 to 40 percent growth year over year, and record users, blogs and total readers, according to Compete.com data and a presentation from Google's Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who spoke at Blog World Expo this afternoon. Rick reported that his platform, Blogger, which I use, is now seeing nearly 300,000 words per minute, scaling to 417 million words per month, from more than 10 million content creators.

Yet, despite this high usage, many have challenged the platform, saying "blogging is dead". There are more than 360,000 results on Google saying that "blogging is dead", with many high profile articles saying that disparate social networks like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter should be where people's attention are. But Rick said that the rise of microblogging didn't necessarily come at the expense of traditional blogging. In fact, he said these third party sites actually served to drive even more attention and traffic to the core blog content.

"Microblogs are complementary, not competitive," Rick said. "It is a driver of attention and engagement back to the blog."

For Rick, who has run his own personal blog (at tins.rklau.com) and has been active since 2001, he reported that Twitter has become the highest traffic generator for his site outside of search, and in that list, so also are Facebook and FriendFeed. He suggested rather than trying to fight against the flow on microblogging, to embrace it, and make sure your content is available to these disparate networks, while remembering to engage where it lands.

"The blog tends to be visited by people interested in what you are saying, and the people on Twitter and Facebook are interested in you, and by proxy, what you are saying," he said. "I happen to believe that based on what I have seen with my blog for eight years, people are comfortable communicating in the environment they have chosen. If I force the conversation back to the blog, I will lose the audience who have the eagerness to engage, comfortable where they live."

Rick suggested that if you are a Facebook user, to pull your blog content into Facebook, making it available to this new audience, who may leave comments much different than those which are native to your site. He also recommended that you utilize tools like bit.ly to track statistics and click-throughs to your site from those links you send through Twitter, to help you understand how much the microblogs are impacting your own blog.

Given his background at Google, Rick made it clear that the company's data-driven nature forced decisions, and the company continues to see serious growth in traditional blogs.

"There are very few questions that get asked at Google when I don't have the data to back up an answer," Rick said. "You don't get many opportunities to say "I feel" or "it seems" at Google."

But in his experience, Rick suggested that bloggers not get locked into writing posts for specific statistics, including page views. He said that as you are a multi-faceted person, you should be confident writing about more than just one thing, so one should feel comfortable covering more than just the single topic.

"Don't become a slave to the focus of your blog at the expense of having fun.You can be passionate about a wide variety of subjects," he added.

Blogging and micro-blogging are not a zero-sum game, but can be complimentary. Sending blog content to downstream networks makes that content available to those connections who are more comfortable in their own environment. As I have mentioned many times, your blog is your brand - which Rick echoed by saying that on your blog, you control every pixel, and therefore, the end user experience.

Bloggers need to adapt to the new world, but aren't antiquated in this new world. It makes sense to participate wherever the content lands and wherever your readers are, without pushing to centralize the conversation on your site, but there is no substitute for long-form conversations and being passionate. Rick communicated a simple formula: "Content + Passion + Engagement". And that will make the blog go, even in a world of change.

Ev and Biz Discuss Early Days of Blogger After 10th Anniversary

Today, the Web is lit up with reports of vulnerabilities in the geeky Web blogging platform, WordPress. Meanwhile, quietly, its predecessor, sporting 300 million active readers (measured on a 30-day basis), with nearly 400 million words added per day, Blogger, the platform I use, continues to chug away. Often seen as a blogging platform for the less technical Web user, Blogger, recently achieved its 10th anniversary, and invited its founders back to the fold to commemorate the milestone - including Evan Williams and Biz Stone, now better known for their work on Twitter, which has introduced a new form of Web communication to the world, commonly known as microblogging.

On a panel held this Tuesday at the San Francisco office of Google, who owns Blogger after its 2003 acquisition from Pyra Labs, the pair, along with a pair of Blogger representatives, and a few power users of the platform (myself included), looked back on the previous decade and how the world has changed over the years.

When Pyra Labs launched Blogger as a side-project, it was widely perceived that bloggers were "crazy", Ev said. "Who are you to think anybody cares about what you have to say?" he recounted. "It was blasphemy in a lot of ways, and now it is an accepted thing. All that has happened and created freedom of speech in areas and countries that never had them. What now?"

Not surprisingly, the same comments about "who cares" are now often thrown at those pushing their status updates through Twitter and Facebook multiple times a day. While others had doubts, Ev, Biz and others saw opportunity.

"It is just a realization of the potential of the Web - democratized media where everybody has a voice," Ev said Tuesday. "Like most mediums, it takes a while to figure out what to do with them. For years, technically anybody could put things on the Web, but we didn't know what the form was."

Ev's idea is something that is standard practice now, but broke the mold of publishing that had preceded it by decades, if not centuries. "The newest stuff goes to the top, and it doesn't need to fill a page," he recounted. "Now, we work at Twitter, and it is an extension of the same thing. It is very complementary to Blogger and the Web in general."

According to stats released by Blogger this week, the number of active contributors, numbering in the millions, has more than doubled in the last two years, and about a quarter trillion words have been written on Blogger since it launched in 1999. This move is a fulfillment of the vision seen by Ev, and Biz, who worked with Xanga and Pyra Labs before co-founding Twitter.

Biz, taking a longer-term view said, "Over the last ten years, it's like we have been watching a shift in how people communicate. They are moving into new realms, and Blogger was at the beginning of this." He added, "What we are all doing is experimenting. We are finding new ways to add nuance. I have an optimistic view of it, in that we are trying something new. If a user pisses off enough people, it's not going to work."

While Biz and Ev may have been ahead of the game in creating and promoting Blogger (and now Twitter), they don't consider themselves visionaries, only that they were able to capitalize on a new medium, seizing trends and making them easier to achieve.

"A year or two in (to working at Pyra Labs), we said blogging was going to be a big deal," said Ev. "People could publish to the Web whenever they wanted."

Ten years in, the team at Google sees that Blogger is more than just a publishing platform, but also, a great way for them to expand the visibility and evangelize the ever-increasing family of Google products. Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who arrived at Google following the FeedBurner acquisition, explained:

"We are a big distribution platform for a lot of other Google products," Rick said. "The minute something is launched for Blogger, you can scale to millions of users and hundreds of millions of interactions, per day. If you think narrowly of Blogger as a publishing platform for individuals, how can we make it easier to fix the other pieces of the puzzle?"

The early days of Blogger ran into some of the same perception issues many people have around Twitter, particularly when it comes to the level of spam on the service. But the Google team has been working to dramatically lower the amount of junk blogs (or 'splogs') on Blogger.

"If you dial back the clock two to three years, Blogspot had a lot of spam," Rick said. "That could have limited adoption, or contributed to people moving. We talk every week at our team meetings, what percentage of page views do we believe to spam in the last seven days. That's in the low single digits now, and has consistently gone down."

Amusingly, prior to Google's acquisition of Blogger, Biz and Ev pioneered the integration of AdSense on all blogs on the service, but on Tuesday, they admitted they actually made more money from customers paying to opt out of ads than they ever did from ad revenue. Now, of course, Blogger has introduced a "Monetize" tab, so users can easily integrate AdSense and make money for Google, which Rick Klau said led to adoption that wasn't just "hockey stick" growth, but like "a cliff".

With time, blogs became less about egos, or even in driving ad dollars, but instead, play a role much like journalism, where many are taken very seriously, Ev observed.

"The tone changed from this being drivel from egocentric people, to something being powerful to share their voice with the world," Ev said. Everything would have been surprising to view it from the 1999-2000 perspective. We started Blogger as a side project, which we wanted to draw attention to our real product. It took me a year to shake that notion and kill the other product. The idea that it would shape the lives of millions of people was out of the realm of possibility. There were more people able to publish more things more quickly, which was very powerful."

This empowerment of the user led to a number of small changes at Blogger, including one where Biz said they altered buttons to say "I Power Blogger" from the previous "Powered By Blogger".

"We realized that it's not your technology making this happen, but everyone using it and the decisions you are making. It's doing its own thing now," Biz said.

As I have said a few times, as much as we may enjoy the technology required to get our conversations and observations online, it is more about what is delivered than how it happens. Twitter, Blogger and all these tools are infrastructure, and often, the community can help drive a product as much as the product can drive the community. Ev and Biz look to have struck gold twice, and ten years in, despite fierce competition from Wordpress, TypePad and other services, Blogger continues to grow.

Blogger Quietly Turns Ten, Plans Slew of Feature Upgrades

Sunday, August 23rd came and went without a peep from Google's Blogger Team, despite the service celebrating its tenth anniversary from its initial founding at Pyra Labs. Cynically, you might construe this silence as Google's not making the product a top priority, or maybe, you could even think that Blogger is ceding the visibility game to other challengers, such as WordPress. But that's far from the case. While WordPress might have a higher level of geek cred, Blogger has many more users, and the company has prepared a slew of updates that should roll out in the next few weeks - which will be welcomed. Don't expect a mass revamp on the level of a "2.0" moniker, but instead, many smaller iterations, either catching up to the competition, or taking advantage of the service's large installed base.

Interestingly, Blogger mentioned their upcoming 10-year mark back on June 18th, and again, this last week, on August 17th, when they said: "we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features..."

In a given day, I get the opportunity to publish to WordPress, TypePad and Blogger, assuming I update blogs here, at work, or make an addition to my mom's site - still going strong since 2004. Each has its unique differences and challenges. I know that by sticking with Blogger, I've gained some benefits with ease of publishing, and some downsides as advanced widgets make their way to other platforms first. But if I thought the platform were standing still, I'd have jumped, and I know it's not. I'm looking forward to the new releases, as they happen, and congratulate the team on their hitting the big 1-0. Expect more news soon.

See also: Google's Blogger Challenge: Win the Marathon and Don't Bonk.

Google Gets Serious About Blog Search. Look Out, Lijit!

When I met with the Lijit team in Boulder earlier this year, they asked an important question around brand loyalty. While I was already a user of Lijit, did I feel a loyalty to their brand over others? I thought a bit, and answered honestly, that I didn't (or at least not much). I said that if Google were to deliver an equal or better product to theirs, they were already the trusted name in search, and I would at least give them a shot. Today, Google has done just that, taking an element from Blogger In Draft, and releasing it into the wild. It's one of the many steps required to complete the marathon I told you about last week.

As Blogger announced today, the new Search Box gadget searches not only your own posts, but Web pages you link from your blog and blogs in your list (like a blogroll). This is quite comparable to Lijit's offering (see right sidebar), where users can search my blog, my social activity, and my blogroll.

I haven't yet installed the Google Blog Search gadget on my own blog yet, partly due to the fact I am using an older template, and don't yet want to break what works. But you can see the widget in action on Product Manager Rick Klau's blog on the right side.


Searching Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching Links from Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching the Web for FTP
For example, searching his blog for "FTP" displays the results in line on the blog without a pop-up window or going to a new page. I can click "Linked From Here" to see pages that have linked to Rick that also mention the term "FTP", or lastly, I can search "The Web" at large.

It is an elegant solution, so far as I can tell.

So what does this mean for Lijit? Lijit is striving to find a way to measure influence, as well as to develop an advertising network that is trusted for bloggers that use its products, so this doesn't mean the mighty Google swoops in and erases Lijit of the face of the Web. But Lijit will have to work hard to better define itself and make it differentiated from what Google offers - especially for Blogger users who haven't yet considered moving to WordPress.