The itch to write

The last release of Blog.com published a new service: Blog.com Cobranded. We now started a closed beta for it.

If you run a site and estimate that you can gather over 20 blog authors to your blogging service, you qualify for the beta. Drop us a note via the support system, and we'll send instructions on how to start your very own blogging service.

Blog.com Cobranded allows any webmaster to run a blogging service on top of Blog.com's infrastructure. This is a complement to our existing ASP model, and allows small to mid-sized portals to add blogging services to their portfolio.

Blog.com cobranded is a hosted solution that can be implemented in minutes. We offer it for free to all sites that qualify and you can even earn additional revenue: the ad inventory generated from cobranded 'powered by blog.com' blogs will be shared.

So who can qualify for this beta?

If you run an afinity community site - sports fan site; association site, alumni site, city site, etc. - you qualify. Together we can offer your visitors a blog service under their preferred domain. For example, if your site is mygolfsite.com, mycity.com or myassociation.com and you have a visitor called John, then you can choose to allow him to register a blog at http://john.mygolfsite.com, http://john.mycity.com or http://john.myassociation.com.

This beta is open to all so please forward this opportunity to anyone you think might be interested. Just suggest they visit our support system and start a conversation :-)

Happy blogging!

As you probably noticed we have replaced the category list with the brand new Tag Cloud on blog sidebars. We just launched the ability to classify your posts into multiple tags or labels. This replaced the old category-based classification mechanism. In the sake of simplicity, we moved existing categories into tags, and removed the interface for category classification.

Tags work like keywords. You can classify a post with as many tags as you like and you can edit them later. We tag posts in a search engine friendly fashion, so that search engines like technorati pickup your posts and assign them to correct tags.

Try it out: Post about a movie, and fill out the tag input with: "movie; drama; scarlet; de palma". Naturally, if you wish to use those exact tags, you'll need to go out to your local theater and watch The Black Dahlia if you wish to write something interesting.

This system is great your personal information, allowing you to later retrieve your posts by combining tags. It also allows you to posts by other authors that use the same tags. It's also great for finding out about people with your tastes, also writing on blog.com -- for example other posts about The Black Dahlia). We'll be working on some new browsing pages that will allow this feature.

If you didn't enjoy this new tag cloud you can switch to the old tag listing system in the Sidebar section in the editor, just click edit in the tag cloud line and choose list. You also can order these blocks alphabetically or by number of posts.

One last note: in the tag cloud, the bigger the tag name the greater is the number of posts under the tag.

We've just launched friends.blog.com. Now you can get all of your friends listed on your blog.com profile. Your personal profile also contains links to your photo albums, your blogs, all of the comments you ever made, and recent posts you wrote on blog.com. Friends.blog.com also allows you to choose which photo should appear on your blog sidebar.

We'll be developing a bunch of new features based on the new personal profile concept, so we're open to suggestions. Feel free to comment on the post with ideas for new features, or improvements on existing ones.

The XML-RPC blogging interfaces are now online. If you prefer blogging using a desktop application, like Ecto, Flock, Performancing or any other that implements the MetaWeblogAPI, now you can. For applications that support discoverability, just point them to your blog address, and they'll figure out the server parameters from there. For all others, you'll need to provide this information:

• Server address: http://rpc.blog.com/api/
• API: MetaWeblogAPI (you may also use the Blogger or the MovableType APIs)

Navigational warning: We have upgraded our feed formats. We were previously syndicating blogs under RSS 0.92 and Atom 0.93. Both formats are currently deprecated, so we moved to the current versions: RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. We have tested support by major newsreaders on current platforms: web based, windows, mac and linux. Nonetheless, if you find that any blog.com feed is faulty, please get in touch with support. Include this information:

• The feed address (or the blog name + feed type: rss or atom).
• The news reader complaining about the feed, including version information

What is a feed and why should I care?

A blog feed is a form of syndication. It allows people who read blogs to use newsreaders. Newsreaders check when blogs have been updated, get the new contents, and present all new posts aggregated to the user. There's a good list of popular news readers here. You can get a more complete description at Wikipedia.

It's natural that part of the readers of your blog do so via newsreaders. If their newsreader does not support current RSS and Atom formats, they may start seeing errors about your blog. If this happens, please let us know. If it's fixable by us, we'll fix it, if not we'll contact the newsreader developers.

RSS or Atom?

We support both, and will continue to do so until one of them reaches a much larger userbase over the other -- which is unlikely for a couple of years.

Atom conveys more information, in a more structured form and is supported by a better written specification document. If subscribing to a blog.com feed, we suggest you use Atom.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I'm proud to anounce a very big release that includes:

• a Dashboard, that will allow you to manage all your account, like blogs, albums, profile, etc...
• a remodeled Editor, simplier and cleaner.
• a new Photo Blog with tagging.

Please mind that in the next few hours there some wrinkles while we finalize the last details.

Feel free to tell us what you think of these new features.

• you'll experience blog.com in the language of your choice, and
• to make things just a bit spicier, the designers at blog.com chose to play around with national stereotypes to bring you a funny look on today's nations.