Google is making an effort to put a new coat of paint on its long running Blogger service. Today Google announced on the Blogger Buzz site that it was launching a major revamp of the service"s content management software, as well as its traffic data tools. According to Blogger"s Project Manager Chang Kim, "We"ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it"s faster and more efficient for you."
One of the changes in this week"s update should give blog creators more space to look over their work before they publish it. As Kim states, ", ... the post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work." In addition the update includes a new section called "Overview" that allows blog site editors to check out things like detailed web site traffic reports, the number of comments the blog receives and more. This is apparently just the first in a planned series of updates to Blogger"s back end, with Kim saying that more new features will be added in the near future.
Blogger is one of the oldest of the free blogging software services. It was launched back in 1999 and Google acquired Blogger in 2003. However, as News.com points out, the service is well behind the leading content management system WordPress. At the moment over 56 million blogs and web sites use WordPress"s content management tools, with a whopping 100,000 new WordPress-based sites launching every day. Half of those sites are hosted by WordPress as well.