So, Blogger.com has upgraded its service. I started my blogging exploits some two years ago using Blogger and still use it for my ExecutiveSummary.com site. In fact, for the last few weeks, I’ve been a beta tester for the new version of the software, although I was sworn to secrecy about it until now.

With all due respect to my friends at Blogger, I’m rather underwhelmed with the upgrade, particularly since the developers have been promising a major upgrade to the platform for more than a year, and even more so since Blogger’s original startup firm, Pyra, was purchased by deep-pocketed Google last year. Frankly, as far as I can tell, there are relatively few new real features, and most of these are fairly cosmetic. Here are what they are touting as the new features, all of which are indeed welcome improvements:

• A quicker sign-up process — While valuable, this is really of more benefit to Blogger than it is to bloggers, in that it is likely to help more people opt to use the software, but it’s a process any blogger goes through only once.
• Lots of new templates to choose from — Again, nice, but it’s not much help to me, as I’ve already designed my sites and am satisfied with those design. It’s not really an operational feature improvement to the software, though design is a key feature for a successful blog, so I’m sure this well be valued by many users.
• A general face-lift to the back-end editing interface — It is much prettier, but I don’t know that the programming efforts spent in that regard makes the process of blogging any easier or more efficient.
• A built-in comments feature — This is a highly valued improvement, but actually it was such a glaring omission from the old system, it is hard to give them points for adding it in at last, as it’s more a question of them finally meeting a standard of a requirement than it being any great improvement. Also, since many Blogger users have turned to third-party providers of comments (I had been using Haloscan), it would have been nice if Blogger had now provided a means to import one’s existing archive of comments, but as far as I can tell, they haven’t.
• The ability to archive individual post pages — Again, I hate to sound like an ingrate, but this was another serious deficiency of Blogger till now, so it’s hard to see this as a great value-add but more like coming up to par for a blog publishing tool. When I switched from using Blogger to Movable Type on my personal blog a few months ago, I saw my traffic raise fivefold to date. I haven’t been doing much differently in terms of my own blogging, so I attribute that dramatic increase in traffic almost entirely to Google being able to index my archives much more effectively, which is ironic, as Google owns Blogger. I suspect this change will bring similar improvements in Google traffic for existing Blogger users.
• The ability to create a user profile — Fine, but it’s not exactly a critical improvement, IMHO.
• The ability to post via email — In keeping with the mobile blogging (aka “moblog”) phenomenon, I suppose some people will value this, but it isn’t a critical feature for my concerns.

I don’t mean to sound too harsh (I’m tired and under deadline pressure, so hence a bit cranky), but I really don’t think this feature set was worth more than a year’s anticipation. Nice-to stuff, some catch-up stuff, but nothing break-through or otherwise tremendously exciting.

I’ve been keeping notes for a while about a long blog post I plan at some point about all the features I’d like to see in blog platforms, but here’s an abbreviated list of some features I think blog softwares need to supply:

• Photoblogging tools — Obviously, digital cameras and blogs are a natural match. Many bloggers like to take pictures and upload them to their blogs. In this capacity, I’ve played around with photo gallery tools including snapGallery and Express Thumbnail Creator (ETC), both of which leave something to be desired (snapGallery is simple but fairly limited and inflexible in its features, which ETC allows for a lot more customization but it’s more cumbersome to use and somewhat buggy in my experience). With the launch of TypePad (which is what I use to publish this blog), Six Apart introduced a Photo Albums feature, which is my favorite of all photo gallery tools that I’ve encountered. I think a feature like this should be standard issue for all blog publishing tools. I’m really hoping to see it in a future release of Movable Type, though I gather something like it is not yet a part of the 3.0 release of MT.
• Search — When it comes down to it, blogs are little more than crude databases. Search is a fundamental feature for any database, and it should be a basic feature of every blog publishing tool. Movable Type has a search feature, though it’s not very good (e.g., if you search several words that you know are in a particular blog post but don’t necessarily appear consecutively, it’s likely not to find the page in question). pMachine also appears to have built-in search, though I’m not personally familiar with that system (or most other blog publishing systems, for that matter). Curiously, TypePad, also made by Six Apart, which makes Movable Type, does not have search. And, considering that Blogger is owned by Google, it’s a rather striking that they do not yet include a search feature, though I gather they are “working on it.”
• Blogroll feature — Again, a blogroll — that is, a list of links in the margin of a blog pointing to the blogger’s favorite sites — is a fundamental feature of most blogs. TypePad also has a nice feature built into the system to automate this, called TypeList. Creating a blogroll in Blogger requires either kludging it by hand in the raw HTML template files, which is how I’ve done it, or using a third-party plug-in such as Blogrolling. The latter leaves a few things to be desired, to my mind, including that you’re dependant on multiple tools to compile your blog pages, including content served dynamically from another domain, which just invites problems, and also since the links are served up dynamically and are not hard-code into the archived pages (at least last time I checked), it means that Google doesn’t see those links when it indexes a blog, so that they other blogs one links to do not get the benefit to their PageRank. (I could be wrong on that, but I’m pretty sure. Clarification from those who know better are welcome.)
• Categories — Again, this is such a basic feature for blogs, it’s another rather glaring omission that Blogger’s major upgrade still lacks it.
• Email newsletter — This is a feature that, to my dismay, no blog publishing platform that I’m aware of offers. I believe Movable Type may allow you to automatically send new posts via email to subscribers on a post-by-post basis, but what I think would be much more useful would be to let the blogger schedule newsletters at frequencies of daily, weekly or monthly and have the software simply package together all posts in that period as a newsletter that the blogger could then send out to subscribers. Ideally, the blogger could control variables, such as the design template of the newsletter, and before sending it, he could proofread it, delete posts not worth including the newsletter, uniformly set the length of posts to choices such as “headlines only,” “short” or “full posts,” add an optional introduction to the newsletter and otherwise customize it before pressing “send” manually, or, alternatively fully automating the dissemination, as the blogger prefers. It strikes me as strange that all blog publishers are gaga for RSS and have built it into their platforms, spurring many a nerd to predict RSS will be the future of newsletter publishing, yet the present of newsletter publishing — email — has been do completely ignored by blog software makers so far, despite the fact that the client readers for email are universal among Internet users, much unlike RSS readers.

In conversing about all of this tonight with my friend and house guest Olivier Travers, he points out a significant flaw in my reasoning in all of the above: Blogger.com is not a real competitor to the would-be commercial blog publishing platforms like Movable Type. It is, as he said, “the new Geocities for Google.” In shutting down the Pro version of Blogger months ago, Google clearly signalled that it wasn’t interested in producing a competitive high-end tool for serious blog publishers but rather something free for the masses to help create more inventory for Google advertising. Along with Gmail, Blogger is just another free service Google can offer its users in its inevitable morphing into an online media portal service.

As a freebie service, Blogger will set the standard for the basic features of a blog publishing tool that the fee-based services will have to out-perform, but it probably doesn’t make sense for Blogger to try to stay competitive with all the features in those more robust platforms if its revenue model remains indirectly tied to the users of the tool. Evan Williams, Pyra’s founder, may not like that analysis, but I suspect Olivier is right.

(Meanwhile, I should note, TypePad and Moveable Type sorely need a friggin’ spell checker, as well as automatic post saving, among other features that Blogger already has…)

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