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by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA) It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter . Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share." When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email. We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source. On the other hand, if you'r...

Earlier this year, a number of our users complained about their experience on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint. Much commentary at the time focused on claims that we were removing blog posts at the behest of music labels, that we were not notifying users, and that we weren't providing users with any recourse if they were linking to the music with permission. Though we noted at the time that we hadn't changed anything and were still following our documented policy, we realized that there was room for improvement. Over the next several months, we talked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ChillingEffects.org , and reached out to a number of users to find out what they'd like to see in our policy moving forward. We're happy to make those changes our latest birthday present for our users. First, a quick review: the DMCA is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where thei...

by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland) In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget. Label Cloud Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly: Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels: Selected Labels If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget: We hope you like it! This is one of many fea...

by Brian Shih, Google Reader Team If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're  following , you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's  new Send To feature , we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's  settings page  and enable Blogger from the list of services: Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to  our help group ,  Twitter , or  Get Satisfaction . This is one of many features announced as part of  Blogger's 10th birthday . Happy Birthday!

A few months ago we mentioned that Blogger was turning 10 years old later this year. That day is almost upon us — just six days away in fact — and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate. Wait, what? What we could give you ? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded: you connected with far away family , shared your art , grew up , demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research , overcome childhood adversity , met authors and poets you admire , coped with an illness , became a parent , learned a new culture , struggled with your parents' divorce , placed digital messages in virtual bottles , helped people fix their cell phones , wrote a novel . You ...