(Blogger Buzz) We’re thrilled to announce that the Blogger Template Designer has launched toBlogger in Draft, our experimental playground where users can try out Blogger’s latest features. The Template Designer brings a new level of customization to your blog. [...]

We worked with iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.

Google is also teaming up with the Blogger theme designers in order to have their creations featured within the new theme store, which should help make BlogSpot blogs slightly more attractive (as not everyone is gifted in web design).

But what is really impressive is the fact that Google is introducing advanced customization tools that enable blogspot fans to easily change the layout of their blogs without touching one line of code.

Previously if users wanted to create a blog with multiple columns, they had to dig deep into the HTML and CSS of their site in order to manually adjust the appearance.

Now lovers of Blogger can (with one click) select whether they want to their blog to have two, three or even four columns (or even none at all) which will help save blogspot fans time and frustration with layout design.

In order to access these features, blogspot fans will have to visit Blogger’s eternal beta site at draft.blogger.com, although if you are still using Internet Explorer 6, these features will not work properly (as Google is no longer supporting that dead browser, and neither should you).

Google is promising to release more features for Blogger, which should help them maintain their lead as the world’s most popular blogging platform.

After unleashing custom domains to the world for Blogger, it looks as if the boys and girls at Google will be shutting down FTP access for the small faction who refused to host themselves upon Mountain View’s servers.

(Blogger Buzz)  FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing. [...]

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010.

(Note: Emphasis is from Blogger Buzz)

Google has already created a dedicated blog to help FTP users migrate back to blogspot (or better yet underneath their own custom domain).

This news will probably upset blogspot fans blogging from hostile nations like China, where hosting a blog within ones borders can lead to an early death of not only the blog, but the author as well.

(Note: For those of you looking for alternatives of expressing your opinion without sacrificing your life, WordPress.com and Live Journal are free alternatives that (thus far) are not blocked by the Great Firewall of China (at least according to Website Pulse).

If any readers know of any other blog platforms that are not blocked, feel free to add suggestions below)

Plurk, one of the biggest microblogging services in Asia, is accusing Microsoft China for ripping off not only their design but also their code with their beta release of MSN Juku, Microsoft China’s newly released microblogging service based on Windows Live Messenger launched last November 2009.

According to Plurk’s blog post,

“… we were absolutely shocked and outraged when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft’s new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walkthroughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China’s offering ripped off our service.”

To see for yourself, below is a screenshot of Microsoft Juku and Plurk:

If Microsoft wanted a horizontal style layout, they could’ve at least changed the design elements! I mean, c’mon!

More after the jump…

Sadly, Juku’s imitation doesn’t just end there. Apparently, aside from the design, they copied the code as well.

On closer inspection, we found that MUCH of the codebase and data structures that Microsoft’s MClub uses are identical snapshots of our code. Microsoft has taken Plurk’s custom developed libraries, css files and client code and just ported them directly over to their service without any attempt to even mask this!

Here are some screenshots taken by the Plurk team comparing the code of Plurk and Juku side by side:

Of course, the code are not exactly alike. However, it is easy to spot the similarities in both the structure, as well as with the variables and functions used. Plurk claims that 80% of the client and product codebase were copied from them.

Microsoft was quick to give out an official statement regarding the issue saying that,

“Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations. It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing.”

A few hours later, Juku’s service was suspended followed by an official press release on the Microsoft website which read:

On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.

When we hire an outside company to do development work, our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.

We will be suspending access to the Juku beta indefinitely.

We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.

It seems that all of this is the fault of the independent vendor that they hired who clearly lacks the creativity to come up with their own design and code. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this is not a valid excuse as they should have seen the similarities with their new product and Plurk, which is already quite well-established in Asia for them to not notice.

No news about Plurk’s response yet. Be sure to tune in here on BloggingPro for updates on this issue!

The 9rules blog network is accepting submissions for a new round of blogs!

The new round of submissions has begun and will end at 11:59 PM EST today. This is consistent with 9rules’ 24-hour window of blog submissions.

If you’re interested in joining a network of quality blogs, then submit yours now! Remember, submissions end within the day and feel free to spread the word.

The feature is automatically enabled on all blogspot blogs. To enable/disable the feature, go to your blogs Settings>Comments page and you’ll find the option labeled “Show profile images on comments?”

For those who don’t have a profile photo yet, Blogger has included a form wherein you could upload a photo while in the comment preview page. The next time you comment on a blogger blog, your profile photo will be automatically added next to your comment.

Additional news: A few weeks ago, Blogger launched another new feature called “jump break“, which is quite similar to Wordpress’ “more tag” feature.

Honestly, this new feature reminded me a little bit of the Twitter environment. I say that because I first saw this type of feature at Twitter.com :)  BUT NOW, it’s Blogger.com’s new Followers gadget. This gadget allows you to see who’s following/reading your blog AND has become a fan of it by adding it to their list of favorite blogs to visit.  As you could see above, it uses their blogger.com avatar as part of the gadget display.

Take a peek at what you see as the blog owner in your blogger dashboard:

A neat summary of how many followers you have AND the ability to “pay-back” by following your followers blogs too.  Now isn’t that useful? :)  

At the dashboard you are given the ability to follow other blogs too, even if they’re not hosted at blogger.com.  Just head on to your dashboard and click “add”, then type in the blog address to quickly add it to your favorites.  If the blog you just followed is hosted at blogger.com your avatar will be included in that blog’s followers list.

Haven’t seen this added to WordPress 2.7 features yet.  I hope the widget developers can also make a WordPress version soon?

I’ve visited other blogs (here, here and here) who have mentioned this story. In a unifying way they have expressed a great loss for the internet.  Patry’s copyright blog has been a great reference to lawyers, politicians, big big companies and well, his fans.  That blog will surely be missed.

Who is William Patry?  He is…

Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Formerly copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, formerly Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, formerly Law Professor, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; author of numerous treatises and articles (including one on fair use with Judge Richard Posner), including the new 7 volume treatise on “Patry on Copyright”. The views in this blog are strictly mine and should not be attributed to Google Inc.

That text reference was taken from the “about me” section of his blog accessed thru www.archive.org .  The last line, to me,  is the most striking one.  His blog was a personal blog, and while he is Senior Copyright Counsel of Google, that last line separated his views from his office.  When he posts, he says he posts not as Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel, but as William Patry.  It would seem that many found it hard to read his words in a personal nature.  Reading his farewell post, he mentions that he leaves for two reasons:

1. The Inability or Refusal to Accept the Blog for What it is: A Personal Blog
2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

Because of WordPress’ quick setup and use facility, the blog was able to set-up specific feeds from several Red Cross regions in the affected states.  People can subscribe to RSS feeds from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The blog currently has 23 active categories, most interesting is their photo blog (linking to their flickr feeds) containing Red Cross “in action” in those areas.

I’ve noticed that it updates quickly allowing people to get the “blow by blow” news where needed, when needed.  Another great WordPress way of initiating grass roots cooperation within, and between, Red Cross centers.

Very informative is the “how to use” section and the “maps” page.  Gives you a great feeling of what’s happening “on the ground” and where best you can fit in to help.

The developers, I see, have used a lot of the freebee services the internet has to offer, from flickr to slideshow.com to the feeds… you name it… they’ve used it.

Here are some details from Blogger’s Blog:

Today we’re adding autosaving of draft posts to the Blogger post editor. Now you don’t have to feel so bad about browser crashes, random laptop restarts, or that hamster vs. gerbil war going on behind your desk that keeps knocking your power cord out of the socket, because Blogger is automatically saving as you type! It’s doing it to me right now. Even if I…

*smash*

Whoops! I just pretended that my browser crashed for the purpose of illustrating that the above paragraph is still intact, thanks to autosave! So say “goodbye” to lost blog posts. You won’t miss them.

I am happy to see more blogging tools use such features, as I am forever crashing Firefox on both my laptop and desktop. Interesting though that I haven’t heard of any new features being added lately to a hosted tool that WordPress doesn’t already have.

After 4 years of writing, off and on, about a variety of things such as odd thoughts, close calls, success (and failure) and other things now relegated to the archives, it’s time to switch directions and start anew.

From the get go I’ve always envisioned this site as an outlet for experimental creativity and to share the results of such with whomever was interested.

This site’s focus was never meant to be excluded to just a blog, but due to my interests in creative writing it just remained. Like Anton, I’ve been ready for quite some time to move away from just being a blog and realign (not that kind of realignment) my interests and the intentions of this site.

What intrigued me the most is his idea for his archives, and something I am seeing catch on more and more, moving them to paper. That’s right, he will be taking some of his best from his archives and using Lulu, a self publishing platform and printing up a copy or two.

Check out his blog for all the details and thoughts behind his restart.