Google (www.google.com) bought Blogger (www.blogger.com) a while ago – but so far users have not been forced to use the new Google features – that is until now. I just “upgraded” one of my blog accounts and I thought I’d share what I learned.

Things I liked:

• It’s easier for people who aren’t tech savvy to make changes to your blog template and they seem to offer more template options, or at least they’ve added various colors to templates.
• You can now “tag” your individual blog posts to make it easier for users to group any recurring topics on your blog. This is a nice perk that previously set WrodPress apart from Blogger as WordPress (another blog tool) has always offered this.
• You can now add some text that doesn’t change to your blog. You’ve always been able to add a brief blurb near your blog title – but now you can add text to other places as well.

Things I don’t like

1. It’s not as easy to modify the html templates with a tool such as Dreamweaver.
2. You have to set up a Google account to sign into your blog now. Be sure to use a Google account that will work with your blog. So, if you host a blog for your church, set up a Google account for your church rather than use your person account, because once you commit the blog to a Google account/owner you cannot change it.
3. You can’t shift ownership of the blog to another team member.
4. A team can share admin responsibilities for a blog, which is a nice feature. But now the original owner must remain the owner, which is a pain if the original owner moves away or on from a project. I suspect that they will find a way to change this as people are already complaining.