Blogswana

Check out the Blogswana project! Background here:

"The one-year pilot project will work with a group of about 20 college students from one of the major universities, and provide them with blogging and journalism expertise and guidance. They would commit to a year of “blogging for others.” Each student participant would start their own blog, as well as a blog for their “partner” (the person for whom they will blog). Each partner would be someone who has been effected in some way by the AIDS virus."

[via Ev]

NYT: Elderbloggers

The NYT has a good article about senior citizen bloggers that includes interviews with Blogger users Mort Reichek and Milt Rebmann.

Quoth the Times:

While the 65-plus age range is notoriously tech-shy, many say that the blog-hosting companies make it simple to start and maintain one. Mr. Reichek said that when he went to Blogger.com — which is owned by Google — the site showed him how to set up a blog in easy steps.

"I'm a technophobe," he said. "But 1, 2, 3 and suddenly, I've got a blog."

Nice!

Update from Eric:

Jeff Veen (who recently joined us) also linked to this Times piece, providing a bit more background on the 1-2-3 process:

"Back about two years ago, I got the opportunity to work with Blogger on a redesign. Our goal was to dramatically simplify the "first post scenario" -- that is, how quickly can someone who has never even heard of blogging through a sign up process and writing something?"

"At one of our first meetings with the Blogger team, we agreed on a goal: 3 steps. We didn't know what those steps would be, but we knew we wanted to boil the whole process down to something that sounded really easy. After about two months of intensive design and usability, we ended up with something that both accomplished our goal and resonated with a whole new audience of bloggers."

On Spam Removals

As others have noted, we've made good progress in the past six months in reducing the amount of spam on Blog*Spot. One of the tools we're using is an automatic spam classifier. The risk in using a classifier is that we will mistakenly identify good content as spam. This percentage of false positives is both very low and one that we are reducing by further improving our systems.

Because no spam fighting measure is more important to us than protecting the content of our users, we've implemented a number of safeguards to make sure that any mistakes made by the classifier can be corrected. This involves presenting CAPTCHAs or other warnings to the user with instructions on how to contact support to resolve the issue. Our support team usually fixes these problems within one business day.

For certain types of blogs - a fraction of those classified - if we receive no response from the user after a significant period of time, we will mark the site for removal. Even when a blog is in this state, the actual content can still be retrieved and the blog restored for a period of several weeks. We've also put additional warnings in the Dashboard for blogs in this state so that the problem can be corrected quickly.

The steps we've taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole. By taking steps like this, we're able to dedicate more storage, bandwidth and engineering resources to our users instead of spammers.

Blogger's a Fabulous Freebie!

PC World has some kind things to say about Blogger, in its 101 Fabulous Freebies feature:

"Our favorite service is Blogger. The first major free blogging tool (launched in 1999), Blogger stays ahead of the game by remaining incredibly convenient to use and by offering a rich complement of features. If you have a Web server, you can use Blogger to publish your Weblog via FTP. But we like the easy way: hosting the blog on Blogspot. In about 5 minutes, we were able to create a blog, pick an appealing design, and start posting. Uploading images is a simple process, and the service supplies a generous 300MB of photo storage."

"Blogger is especially friendly to mobile bloggers. Can't get access to a computer easily? Send a picture or a text message from your phone to a special SMS address, and up it goes. Blogger's Audioblogger service even offers voice blogging: Just call a special number, enter a code, and say your piece. Blogger converts the sound of your voice (up to 5 minutes' worth) into an audio file and posts it for all to hear."

A few of our siblings here at Google also got some love:

• Google Desktop in Find It: Online search and reference services
• Picasa in Kick Back
• Gmail in The New Faces of Web-Based E-Mail

NYTimes Most Blogged

Be sure to check out the New York Times redesign that just launched. Anil talks a bit about it at the SixApart blog, and Khoi discusses it on his site. The part I'm most excited about is the Most Popular box in the right column — next to most emailed is... most blogged!

"We also wanted to give our readers a greater voice and sprinkle a little more serendipity around the site by providing prominent links to a list of most e-mailed and blogged articles, most searched for information and popular movies."

Concerning the Historie and Nature of Blogs of Note

Way back in — one might say — the “D” “A” “Y,” when Blogger was made by Pyra, before Ev forgot how to read, and most people hadn’t heard about these new “web-enabled Internet log pages” (aren’t you glad people stopped calling them that?), there was the Blog of the Week. But it was a pain to keep updating.

So, Ev went and made a new thing, Blogs of Note, and added it to the Blogger homepage. It was,

[j]ust a simple, ongoing, irregularly updated list of blogs I've happened to come across and found interesting for one reason or another. This reason need not be substantial. It could be I liked a particular post. It could be the blog seems to have good writing, or good design, or original content or concept, or I just like the name.

Blogs of Note enjoyed a cheerful run on the homepage, showing off the ten most recently noted blogs. Ev chose most of them, with other contributions coming from Jason, Maggie, Olivier, and Anil. Eventually Pyra got bought, and Blogs of Note stayed, with new contributors and an ever-growing pool of awesome Blogger-powered blogs to showcase.

Then, in what was otherwise a grand day for Blogger, the informative and helpful new homepage design kicked Blogs of Note off the home page and onto the Dashboard. Though it still showed off darn nifty blogs (including this one), Blogs of Note sniffled a bit and cried itself to sleep at nights. Why wasn’t it getting the homepage love it deserved?

Blogs of Note gamely noted on. It waited for its moment, which finally came when an attempt to put a Blog Search box on the Blogger homepage went awry and ended up as Explore Blogs, an overly delightfully-animated look into the most interesting, most recent, and most random blogs on Blogger (plus a search box). Finally, Blogs of Note was given back its spotlight and — so as not to look stale and lame — we kicked it up a notch and started updating it more often, showing off a new noteworthy blog every day.
In the past five years, over seven hundred blogs have appeared on Blogs of Note (at least one of them twice!), yet all anyone has ever seen is the most recent ten. What’s up with that?

Today we’re happy to unveil something new: the Blogs of Note blog (meta!). Now you can see all the blogs we’ve ever blog of noted, going all the way back to 2001. This also means that if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Blogs of Note Atom feed to get the latest delivered to you every day.

We hope you have fun with this combination slice of blogging history/firehose of hot fresh blogs. As a bonus tip, if you run across a blog that you’d like to check out but that’s not there any more, try running it through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see if they have a copy.

Channel 4's 121

Channel 4 in UK has launched a site called 121 for fostering dialogue between paired sets of folks, one in the UK and one in another country.

It's like a public penpal session written in blog format. For example, their first blog is written by Steve - a bloke from Coventry - and Mr. Behi who lives in Tehran.

Nice lookin' template there, gents!

Search policy

Last Friday, Inside Google posted about a Blog*Spot user who had allegedly received an email from Blogger that stated the MSN Search box on his blog constituted a violation of Blogger's Terms of Service. I'd like to clarify a couple of points about this claim:

1. You have always been able to run non-Google services on your blog. In the same way you can use Yahoo's Flickr to post photos to your blog, you can include an MSN Search box in your template. We consider it a violation of the terms to modify the Blogger navbar, but that's not what was reported to have happened here.


2. We did not send a request to have the MSN Search box removed. We reviewed the information that's been made available, and we found no such request from our support teams.


3. We did not delete nor remove the blog in question from Blog*Spot.

Our content policies enable the widest range of expression possible. And we're proud that Blogger users can customize their blogs in the manner that suits them best ... even if that means using another search tool.

Freevlog

Last week at SxSW I met Michael Verdi, who pointed me toward Freevlog, "a step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free."

Definitely check it out if you're interested in adding video to your blog — it features Blogger as well as the Internet Archive, OurMedia, and FeedBurner. Of course, you should also check out Google Video!

More about Freevlog: http://freevlog.org/

With Apologies to Mike Judge...

You may remember a certain scheduled outage when we removed a particularly hated piece of network equipment from Blogger’s production setup.

Today we finally got our hands on the beast.

Let these photos, and the following limerick, serve as a warning to any other piece of Blogger infrastructure that steps out of line.

There once was a router so crappy
That it made all the Bloggers unhappy
It caused pagers to be beep
And kept us from sleep
So we smashed it on the ground with golf clubs and threw paving stones at it and kicked it and someone filmed part of it but that’s not up yet and then we dropped it off a dumpster and kicked it again and gathered up the parts and sent them to be recycled quite snappy