Just in time for our eleventh birthday, we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July, Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that's fully integrated with Blogger; you don't need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog’s dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin!

The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in. And as access to information becomes more widespread and more immediate, the blogosphere is steadily closing that gap. That’s why the Blogger Team is excited to spread the word about Google’s new improvements to Realtime Search, which provide richer and fresher results than ever before.

From the new Realtime Search homepage, you can search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as the happen for instant blog post fodder.

For more information about Realtime’s new features, please visit www.google.com/landing/realtime.

It’s only five days away, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are about the 200+ Meetups that are happening around the world. We’re looking forward to your meetups, and seeing your photos, videos, and tweets from the event.

We don’t want to leave the best parties empty-handed, so starting tomorrow we will be sending out some Blogger birthday presents to some of the largest Meetups around the world. We can only send presents to Meetups that have organizers, though, and there’s still lots of fiestas that are organizer-less. It’s super easy and any one can do it, so if you volunteer you may be able to secure presents for your local Meetup.

For those of you who haven’t yet joined one of our Meetups, there’s still time! As a reminder, here’s the important details for the event:

Posted by Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu, Software Engineers

Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place.


Introducing Comment Spam Filtering

A blog is an open communications system, inviting conversations from all web users. Unfortunately, spammers have been finding their way into these conversations. To fight spam, some of you enabled moderation of all comments or required word verification or login. While somewhat effective, these checks limit real-time conversations around your blog.

To address this, we’ve integrated Google’s spam filtering technologies into the Blogger comment system. Some of you will notice the new “Comments” tab. (Note: We are gradually rolling this out to all users, so some of you may not see the new Comments tab yet.) In the Comments tab, there is a Spam sub-tab that shows all the comments that are likely spam.


The comments in the Spam inbox are not visible to your readers. Here, you can permanently delete spam comments by selecting them and choosing Delete. You can also mark comments as Not Spam that have been incorrectly classified as spam (what we call the “false-positives”). Choose Not Spam and the selected comments will be moved out of the spam list and will be immediately published on your blog.

These feedback actions also help us better identify spam on your blog. We encourage you to occasionally check your Spam inbox to see if any non-spam comments have been marked as spam. Please note that spam filtering currently only applies to new comments.

You can report any issues with our new spam system by clicking on the “Report spam filtering issues” link on the bottom of the Comments | Spam page, or by visiting this Help Forum page.


Comments “Inbox”

We also created a place where you can see all the comments that have been published on your blog. The Comments | Published sub-tab provides a similar view as your email inbox. This view comes in handy when you want to see all of the comments on your blog in one place. With the new comments inbox, it’s easy to find new comments on old posts.



In the Comments | Published sub-tab, you can select comments and mark them as spam or delete them. When you mark a comment as Spam, it will be deleted immediately from your blog. You can also Delete comments for editorial reasons or just Remove Content to leave a record of the comment.

Comment moderation has also moved under the Comments tab and has been extended to allow you to mark comments as Spam.

We hope that adding comment spam filtering and the new “inbox” user interface will be a good starting point toward improving the Blogger commenting system and we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

Last year, Blogger turned ten. We were excited to present you with a (small-but-mighty) bounty of gifts, a token to commemorate all of your contributions over the years.

Now we’re a year older (and would like to think a bit wiser), have some great features under our belt and are ready for another celebration with you, our closest friends. For Blogger’s 11th birthday, we’re hosting the first ever Blogger global birthday party!

We’ll keep it simple—we set the date, you set the parties and Meetup Everywhere will help facilitate (free of charge!). Through the wonder of Meetup Everywhere, you’ll be able to find other bloggers in your area and either join a celebration that has already been set up or start a new party local to you. The goal is to get together in-person, chat about blogging and celebrate with friends you may have otherwise only met online. Meetups can be simple, and no party is too small. Plus, we’ll be supplying each party with a download-able pack of party supplies, including makings for party hats, name tags and signs. And who knows, there may even be other treasures and surprises in store.

Your invitation

• What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
• How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
• Where: Anywhere you are.
• Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
• When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
• RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

How it works

Everything you need is on our BloggerFiesta Meetup site. To find a party near you, do a quick search on the map. To join a scheduled party, click on the I’m Interested button on the party details page. To start a new party, click on Schedule a Meetup near you at the bottom of the BloggerFiesta site.

When you start or join a party, consider volunteering to be the Meetup organizer. Anyone can do it, plus you’ll get fame and glory. That gives you the ability to set the venue and time of the party. Also, don’t neglect the commenting functionality—you can use it to chat and plan with your fellow attendees prior to the party. What you do at the birthday party is completely up to you.

If you want to get started talking about the meet-ups, you can

• comment on our Facebook page
• Tweet using the hashtag #bloggerfiesta
• Post in our Help Forum
• Tag photos in Picasa Web Albums with bloggerfiesta

See you on the 31st! We’ll have our party hats on.

Guest post by Oliver Roup, VigLink CEO


If you spend as much time working on your blog as we do, you wonder if there's a way to get paid. Many bloggers monetize by selling ads on their site but now there is a way to get paid for your actual content rather than just the ads that go around it.

Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word—you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions.

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn.

There are no other costs or fees and nothing changes about how your site looks or behaves. Join VigLink and enroll your blog in less than a minute or learn more by watching this two minute video.




Oliver Roup is the CEO and co-founder of VigLink, a content monetization company backed by Google Ventures.