Google’s blogging service Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a trillion words in total) to date, writes product manager Chang Kim on the Blogger Buzz blog.

Those blog posts have been read by 400 million readers across the globe, Kim adds. And according to the video below, 75 percent of traffic comes from outside the United States (the service is available in 50 languages).

Now the product is getting an overhaul, the biggest change being a more modern user interface for both the editor and the dashboard (fi-na-lly), built with Google Web Toolkit.

Google says it will be showcasing the new design of the Blogger back-end at SXSW (our coverage of the event), as well as a new content discovery feature that lets users find new content to read based on the topics of the blog they’re visiting.

The new UI is shown extensively in the video below as well, in case you’re not in Austin.

Of note: Google says it will unveil more fresh Blogger features this year – they posit that these are only the ones they’re “allowed to talk about” at this point.

Let’s call a spade a spade: Blogger has been around for a long time, but has unequivocally been losing mindshare to the likes of Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous and even services like Facebook and Twitter for content creation purposes in the past few years.

Its audience is still enormous, though, so it’s nice to see Google hasn’t forgotten its many users around the globe.

We’re looking forward to seeing how the service evolves in the course of this year.

And some pictures (from the Blogger Buzz blog post):

In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the status bursts of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form publishing of WordPress-style blogs. If anything, it is more accurately described as micro-blogging than Twitter or Facebook because you actually produce short blog posts filled with images, links, and videos. But the key to Tumblr’s incredible growth—it’s adding a quarter billion pageviews a week—is how easy it makes it to post something and reblog what your friends are posting.

Tumblr CEO David Karp recently sat down with Chris Dixon for a Founder Stories interview in which explains how he started Tumblr four years ago as a reaction to other blogging tools out there. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” People wanted to express themselves and blog, but he felt that the standard blogging platforms available at the time—Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad—were too complicated. “These tools I just don’t think worked for most people. It’s a commitment, you need to sit down for an hour and hammer out a post.”

He is quick to add that “WordPress is the best tool in the world for that” kind of publishing. But for someone like him who “doesn’t enjoy writing,” it was the wrong tool. So he created Tumblr instead, which is designed to help people get their thoughts and images up as quickly as possible, and to lower the barrier to publishing even more.

But don’t Twitter and Facebook lower those barriers even further? They do, but they lack a strong expressive identity, argues Karp. “They are not tools built for creative expression,” he says, adding: “Nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook.” Okay, he’s got a point there. Tumblr, in contrast, is built to be a place you can be proud to call your online home. It’s very design-oriented and you can customize your Tumblr to reflect your personality, but not in a cheesy MySpace way. For Twitter and Facebook, “expression isn’t necessarily something they care about.”

Update: Watch Part II , III, and IV of this interview.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.

Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. Not only the uptime of the blogging platform’s homepage was monitored, but also four individual blogs.

Pingdom found that Blogger didn’t seem to display any downtime whatsoever in the two months of testing, while WordPress.com also showed an ability to remain available most of the time. Typepad came up third, but not with a lot of difference from the two former blogging service.

When you look at the upstart, basic blogging services, the differences become more clear. Posterous showed mixed results in terms of reliability, but Tumblr clearly takes the downtime cake on that level.

According to Pingdom, some of the Tumblr blogs it monitored during the two-month window were unavailable for more than two days, beating the general downtime of the platform of 24+ hours Tumblr struggled with last week.

Clearly, the startup can use the recent capital injection to improve reliability quite a bit:

However, it should be noted that Tumblr’s problems haven’t just been a few big outages, but a large number of smaller ones. The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with the service.

Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).

Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is available for all non-private Blogger blogs. The only catch is you’ll only see the new ‘Stats’ tab when you go to draft.blogger.com.

On the new Stats page, you’ll see a tab that says ‘Now’, which gives Blogger users an almost real-time overview of which articles are most popular right now, and where those visitors are coming from (both in terms of source and geographical location).

The elephant in the room is of course that Google offers free, robust Web analytics software with Google Analytics that doesn’t boast real-time statistics as it only updates them every few hours. Perhaps this is a first sign of imminent changes on that front?

We love real-time stats around here (we use Chartbeat, but there’s also Clicky, Woopra and many more – and of course Twitter just acquired Web analytics startup Smallthought), so we’re wondering out loud why Google Analytics doesn’t have this feature.

Obviously, there’s no technical limitation, and from what I can gather from issues raised in forums and the Google Analytics Help Center, the company believes most users are simply not interested in seeing real-time stats rather than a good overview of 24-hour traffic and longer periods of time.

Which begs the question: if that’s really the case, why add real-time stats to Blogger?

At least 18 years old? Own a Windows PC? Have 60 minutes to spare?

Google wants you to test usability of its Blogger service on your own computer, and is prepared to give you $75 in American Express gift checks if you participate in a screen sharing session and a phone call with some of their people. Also, you must allow them to record audio or video of said session.

We think you can keep your clothes on, but have been unable to confirm.

On the sign-up page, Google explains that you can register to participate in a usability study and provide feedback on “something that’s currently in development”. It’s unclear what those new developments entail, and participants are required to accept the company’s Usability Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Google only says the study will “help the Blogger team better understand your needs in order to incorporate them into future product enhancements”. It’s anyone’s guess what those are, but considering the fact that they’re specifically asking for users who have computers running Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, we daresay it concerns a desktop client of some sort.

This time, it’s Twitter’s other co-founder, Evan Williams, who appears in a video with developer Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan, Alberto González and some birds, recorded way back when.

More specifically, the recording dates back to 1999, the same year Williams co-founded Pyra Labs – the company behind Blogger, acquired by Google in 2003 – together with Hourihan.

If you’re low on time, skip to the 3:17 mark, when we catch a glimpse of the Pyra Labs office in its early days, and witness the glorious arrival of a brand new server for the Blogger service.

(Thanks, Grigoris!)

Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here).

Update (9 October 2009): this article in Dutch reveals Buma/Stemra has put its foot in its mouth and decided to withdraw from trying to impose fines on individuals who embed music videos, stating they’ll only target ‘commercial’ users after all. Caveat: The association says every website that has ads on it is a commercial venture, which means if your Blogger blog has Google ads on it, you could still be on their radar.

These fees, which will become effective 1 January 2010, were laid out in this brochure (PDF in Dutch) and are, according to the director of Buma/Stemra, calculated based on the fees they currently charge for offline music playback such as copyrighted background music in bakeries and the likes. The fees amount up to €130 ($191) for up to six embedded files, €260 ($383) for up to twelve, and if you embed over thirty files you will be liable for €650 ($957) per thirty or part thereof (i.e. 31 embedded files on your site will set you back €1300 or roughly $1914).

Because God forbid you might want to provide their right holders with a bigger audience for their music and potential new fans who would buy their albums and pay to attend their live performances. The horror!

The association did say that they do not intend to ‘chase’ individual bloggers, but also added that they will not be excluding them from eventual fines either. In an extraordinary act of compassion, they intend to give naughty embedders the chance to take the material down before going after their wallets. Buma/Stemra is currently also trying to start conversations with Google (YouTube, Blogger) and local blogging platform providers like Hyves to try and get financial compensation for them for the distribution of copyrighted material by their users, but so far hasn’t reached any agreements with either party.

Fortunately, several political parties in The Netherlands have already stated that they are concerned about Buma/Stemra’s intentions, posing questions about the juridical grounds for the new licensing fees and publicly wondering if it’s actually a smart idea to refrain music fans from spreading the work of their favorite artists.

Let’s hope common sense prevails.

So we can all keep enjoying this video clip of Dutch rock band Golden Earring, with ‘When the lady smiles’.

Unless it wasn’t actually the blogging equivalent of junk mail but just some overanxious Googler who was so thrilled with some new feature they’re adding to the free blogging service that he/she resorted to gobbledygook speak out of sheer excitement. Or maybe this person was still a bit tipsy from the 10-year anniversary get-together.

We’ll never know, and the post has since been removed.

But someone (or something) was definitely trying to make contact there.

Yes, on Sunday, Blogger turns 10 years old. And to celebrate, the Blogger team (which is now a part of Google following a 2003 acquisition) is promising a bunch of gifts to users in the form of new features. Without naming anything specifically, Blogger points to this list as a good reference point for some of what they’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. Of note on that list are a better commenting system and WordPress-style pages (About page, etc).

It’s worth noting that Blogger’s roots are deeply tied to the new hot web platform of choice: Twitter. Pyra Labs was co-founded by Evan Williams, who is now the CEO (and co-founder) of Twitter. Also a part of Pyra Labs were Jason Goldman who now runs product development for Twitter, and Jason Shellen who now runs Thing Labs, the makers of Brizzly, a much buzzed-about new Twitter client.

Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, joined the Blogger team at Google before leaving with Williams in 2004 to start Obvious Corp. which would eventually birth and turn into Twitter. (An interesting side note is that Williams’ Pyra co-founder Meg Hourihan, eventually married Jason Kottke, who is best known as being one of the web’s most popular bloggers.)

These days, while the web is abuzz over Twitter, no one really talks much about Blogger despite millions of people using it everyday. The fact is that as a platform, it has fallen behind the more nimble blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr in recent years. Still, in terms of straight up simplicity in setting up a blog, it’s easy to see why Blogger is still popular among users (and, unfortunately, spammers).

Update: As as Faridur notes in the comments, current Twitter Creative Director Douglas Bowman also worked on the Blogger team back in the day.

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by WordPress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, WordPress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host WordPress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to WordPress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for WordPress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will WordPress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

Google’s blog publishing platform, Blogger, is bringing its Custom Search Box gadget out of its beta version, also known as Blogger in Draft. The search gadget a blog’s readers search posts, web pages linked from the blog, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list.

Google initially launched the gadget on its Blogger in Draft platform, which offers users a version of Blogger where Google tests out features and new interfaces. Google says it has upgraded the search gadget to provide simpler defaults as well as the ability for the box to integrate with the aesthetics and color of your blog. The Search Box gadget uses AJAX Search APIs to power the feature and also automatically updates the custom linked search engine when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists.

Custom search can be a useful tool for blogs because it allows readers to not only search a blog’s content but also any pages or favored sites that are linked to, giving readers a related, but still-focused, search experience.

Blogs that you follow will be listed in your Blogger profile and the integration will also leverage existing relationships, meaning you’ll be able to quickly see if your friends are also following those blogs.

The integration was announced on Google’s new Social Web Blog, and the post promises more goodies in the future:

And this is just the first step in the integration, so be sure to stay tuned for further improvements, including an easy way to add OpenSocial gadgets through Blogger and the integration of the commenting features.

Here’s a video:

Just two weeks ago, Google introduced what it calls the Social Bar, a way for webmasters to include a small strip on top of their web pages and to enable them to add links for drop-down gadgets that lets visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, etc.

Google Friend Connect, which is the company’s own data portability effort, was opened up for all websites in the beginning of December 2008, right when Facebook made Facebook Connect generally available as well.

And thus, the battle for who will control access to your online identity continues. My guess is it’ll go on for a while before someone can be declared the winner, if at all.

The defamation suit, filed in Manhattan, seeks a court order compelling Google and its Blogger service to identify the anonymous blogger. Google declined to discuss any specifics, only responding to the claim by saying they sympathize with victims of cyberbullying but “take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order”, so we’ll leave you with a quote from Cohen instead:

“I’m tall, I’m blond, I’ve been modeling for many years, and people get jealous,” she said. “If I had to deal with everyone who is jealous, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”

While some people are quick to dismiss that the model would have a case, and that she’s just looking for attention, I’m not so sure. It’s nearly impossible to identify bloggers who don’t reveal their real name without the help of the companies that maintain publishing platforms, and a line has to be drawn somewhere regarding what people can say anonymously just because they’re using the internet to say it.

The attacks on the blog are rather personal and vicious, and they’re targetting Cohen almost exclusively. As Ars Technica points out, the model will need to demonstrate defamation twice: once to show that she has a sufficient case that the identity of the blogger should be unmasked, and then again for suing the blogger directly.

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. WordPress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. WordPress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.

By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger dashboard.

Since Blogger is owned and run by Google, the posts from the blogs you follow on Blogger can also be accessed with Google Reader in a special “Blogs I’m Following” section.

While the new following feature will be useful for staying on top of your favorite content, the main benefit to Blogger will come from introducing a better sense of community, one that can be built out gradually into a more functional social network. The Blogger team has already announced its intention to implement Google Friend Connect throughout the blog network, so it’s definitely heading further in this direction.

On the one hand, this new feature roll out can be seen as just an attempt to stay competitive with Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have already developed social features of their own (and the former of which has run into the arms of Google’s social networking nemesis, Facebook).

But Google also conspicuously lacks a social network with any significant amount of popularity in the United States (Orkut hasn’t made much headway here). So perhaps it has decided to pin much of its social networking hopes on Blogger, which could be leveraged to bolster the usage of Google Friend Connect and eventually OpenSocial as well.

If you’re a Blogger user and don’t see the new following feature yet, you may have to wait a few weeks – they are rolling it out gradually.

[News via The Social]

In Febuary of this year Google re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Google had acquired Jotspot some 16 months earlier, during which time Jot was only available to existing customers and closed to new signups. What happen during those 16 months and why did the process of integrating with Google take so long? Looking through the list of companies that Google has acquired, Jotspot would be considered lucky as many others have died, stalled or lost out to competitors because of the acquisition process.

Blogger was acquired by Google in Febuary of 2003, and at the time it was the leading blog platform by a wide margin. Within a few months, MovableType had taken over the self-hosting market, followed by Typepad and then WordPress and WordPress.com. In the interim Blogger had stalled at Google, with no new feature releases, no improvements and a lack of support.

In 2005 Dodgeball was acquired – a potentially early Twitter or cool location based service, and it died inside Google. In Febuary of 2006, MeasureMap, the blog analytics tool, was acquired and never heard from again. GrandCentral went to Google last year, for $45M, and since then the service has been frozen with no new users allowed to signup and sporadic periods of downtime (meaning users cant get any phonecalls, at all).

One of the first main challenges for a company that has been acquired by Google is adopting the proprietary technology stack used within the company. Google does use Linux and open source, but their core technologies are all internal to the company. I have heard that it can take a new engineer at Google anywhere from 3-6 months to become accustomed to using these tools and services. The table below sets out the Google stack and the technologies used:

Google Technology Stack

Because of the difference in technology, it can take a company anywhere from a year to three or more years to move over to the Google infrastructure and architecture. Blogger was still running their own infrastructure until their new release last year, and they have finally integrated Google ID’s. YouTube is one of the only recent acquisitions where full steam and emphasis were placed into getting the site moved over to run on the Google platform. YouTube managed to pull it off, but it is a rare case inside Google (and also a special case).

The problem isn’t one that is unique to Google, as the other big web and technology companies such as Microsoft have also struggled with or simply neglected some of the companies they acquire, but there are problems that are very specific to Google because of the technology they use. Microsoft develops their products using .NET and the Win32 API, there are millions of developers capable of developing in this environment. There are also millions of open source developers capable of swinging PHP, Python or Ruby. But building on MapReduce and BigTable at Google? There are only a few thousand specialists who are all either already employed at Google or former employees.

And what comes of former Google employees? They spend years building on a technology stack that nobody else is using. How useful are they to a company that is looking for MySQL, Apache, Python, PHP etc. experts? It probably isn’t as big an issue – as the developers can adapt to their environment, especially considering Google is hoarding some of the best developers out there.

The stack of technologies developed by Google has helped them build out their search engine and core technologies quickly and efficiently – not to mention at a fraction of the cost of what they would have paid using traditional clustering and hardware. But when it comes to bringing external technologies and companies in house, the Google technology stack is a tax on developers which slows down development to a point where it can kill a product.

The solution for Google is to either adopt a more open stack in parallel to what they currently use, or to open source their internal technologies (as Facebook and Yahoo! are doing) in the hope that they will spread and gain adoption from more developers.

More significantly, Blogger now supports right to left writing as well for Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.

Blogs in Arabic and Persian have been hosted by Blogger from its pre-Google days, so it’s surprising that the service is only now officially supporting the languages.

The Middle East presents strong growth opportunities for Google and other companies as younger generations embrace the internet. Even in more closed countries such as Iran, blogging has long been popular and Blogger has often been the platform of choice. Bloggers in many Middle Eastern countries blog at their own risk, with sites regularly becoming blocked or as is the case in countries such as Saudi Arabia, bloggers are arrested and jailed.

Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year.

Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code “bX-uxu3fu,” and were unable to read their blogs, or log in to the backend. No further details are available as Blogger employees have not responded to the official Blogger forum at the time of writing with a response. We’ll update the post if we find out more.

I did try clicking on a few of the blogs highlighted as being updated from the front page of Blogger, and from five attempts I managed to visit five spam blogs, so at least some of the biggest users of Blogger don’t seem to be affected by this issue

Update: reports that most of Blogger is back up from around 6:45pm PST. Still no word as to what went wrong.

(via Paris Lemon on Twitter, who’s blog is also down)

The new service will allow anyone with an OpenID account, including LiveJournal and TypeKey services to log in and validate a comment on blogs running under the Blogger in Draft service. Google notes that the feature is a test and that they will seek user feedback, but all things being equal this will end up being provided on Blogger itself.

The bigger news, particularly for rabid OpenID advocates is a suggestion from Google that they are “working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web,” which sounds a lot like code for Google is looking at turning Blogger logins into OpenID log ins in a similar way that AOL did with its user base.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know who is driving this, and Google even drops a hint in the example link: “http://brad.livejournal.com/”; LiveJournal founder and former SixApart employee Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google in August and is credited as the founder of OpenID.

OpenID advocates are passionate about the potential of the idea, but despite the noise and companies such as Digg, Yahoo and even to some extent Microsoft adopting OpenID it has failed to capture the broader public’s imagination. If the 1000 pound Gorilla in the room decides to adopt OpenID across its range of products, presumably with Blogger being only the first step of a broader rollout, OpenID may finally take off outside of the first adopter and tech communities.

Thanks to David for the tip