What Will 2008 Hold for Blogger?

The Blogger Buzz blog released a list of their top features this year, so this post will highlight some more of them. Blogger has evolved drastically over the past year and has proven to be one of the top blogging platforms, with open source WordPress.com/self-hosted WordPress.org competing right beside it. Links bring you the post page where additional links and details are located. 

A timeline of events:

January 2008

What new enhancements will Blogger announce in January?

December 2007

December 13 – OpenID commenting added – meaning that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL/AIM.

December 20 – Fixes for unregistered commenters and cropped header images were fixed.

November 2007

November 2 – AdSense video units released, letting you include relevant YouTube videos on your blog and make money from them.

November 19 – Slideshow page element added – letting you add a slick little slideshow of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket, or any other site that supports media RSS.

November 26 – A tutorial was created to help bloggers who want to post videos to their blog via YouTube.

October 2007

October 4 and 8 – Blogger encourages bloggers to participate in Blog Action Day and to support DonorsChoose.

October 12 – An iGoogle gadget is added for the Blogger play feature.

October 25 – Subscribe to comments via email feature added, making it a lot easier to stay in the conversational look after you’ve commented on a post somewhere.

September 2007

September 13 – Foxy Tunes adds Blogger support – allowing you to add your favorite music to your blog and adding more interactivity for bloggers.

September 14 – Blogger Play launched, which shows you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs.

August 2007

August 7 – Browse other users profiles to find other bloggers who share your interests such as occupation, industry, location, interests, favorite books, movies, music, etc.

August 23 – Blogger turns eight years old, and a new iGoogle gadget present is added for the Blogs of Note.

August 24 – Video uploading to Blogger is added, making it much easier for bloggers to upload videos and create video podcasts.

August 28 – AdSense ads can now be shown inside your block of blog posts, up to three times on the main blog page using inline ads.

August 31 – Blogger clarifies an issue that users were having with malware and the mail2blogger email addresses, infecting their computer’s address books and then posting the spam mail to their blog.

July 2007

July 9 – Twitter releases a new web badge to easily display your Twitter updates in your blog’s sidebar.

July 11 – Polls feature comes out of draft and is now an official page element. FeedBurner users now can specify a URL to which Blogger will redirect your feed’s traffic.

June 2007

June 12 – Blogger clients updated including Windows Live Writer – adding labels support and Mac’s MarsEdit software added photo upload support via Picasa Web Albums. Blogger Dashboard widget fixed for Mac users.

June 13 – An experimental version of Blogger, Blogger in draft was released, with Video Upload as the first feature added.

June 27 – Seventeen new languages added to the list of nineteen already existing with a new dropdown menu. Blogger in draft added new features such as polls – which you can add to your blog sidebars and enclosures – which turns your blog feeds into pod/video-casts.

May 2007

May 4 – Old Blogger is completely removed, with all new accounts finally switched over to New Blogger, unless you want to manually revert back (using HTML only themes).

May 11 – Blogger Data API Developer Guide updated, with new sections covering development in several of the available client libraries.

May 17 – Autosaving of draft posts in the Blogger post editor is integrated. The page will periodically send a copy of the text,title, labels, etc. to the Google servers about once a minute, unless you type a lot. Keyboard shortcuts are also revamped.

May 21 – Although not directly related to the development of Blogger, they announced that they will pay people up to $100 simply for playing with Blogger for an hour or so.

May 22 – A screencast was made by Ryanne, which is a tutorial for adding a header to a blog using the new feature.

April 2007

April 11 – Support for eight new languages added including Nederlands, Türkçe, Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, suomi, and others, bringing the total to nineteen.

April 12 – Hindi transliteration feature added enabling users to type out Hindi words using phonetically equivalent Enlgish script transformed into the corresponding Devanagari script.

April 16 – One Thousandth ‘Blog of Note’ announced. The Blogs of Note is a project started more than five years ago highlighting interesting blogs for others to discover.

March 2007

March 1 – Google Blog Search (within Blogger) had some slight changes to its look and feel – making it more consistent with the Google styling. Date-restrict functionality added to find blog articles posted within a certain period of time.

March 2 – Google Blogger gblogger using the Google Data API allows users to blog from within the comfort of a full-featured editing environment.

March 8 – Picasa Web Albums integrated into Blogger. Each blog now has its own album in Picasa, which can now be used as a photo manager for your blog.

March 30 – Newsreel and Video Bar added to the template widgets displaying Google News results for your chosen keywords and videos from the Google Video and Youtube library based on your keywords.

February 2007

February 1 – Blogger adds an API for adding a custom widget to a blog, which bloggers can then add to other blogs.

January 2007

January 5 – The ability to blog using a custom domain for serving your blog was added, adding the ability to blog from mysite.com instead of mysite.blogspot.com. Using this service, you can now brand your blog even more using free hosting and a domain.

December 2006

December 19 – Blogger comes out of beta and the new version of Blogger is released. New features including drag-and-drop template editing and posts labels as well as a better-designed Dashboard and easier comment adding.