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Posted by Noah Fiedel and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers Just in time for our eleventh birthday , we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July , Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that's fully integrated with Blogger; you don't need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog’s dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin! Feature Highlights Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement ; meanwhile, here are some quick highlights for you. Real-time tracking . Each time your blog is viewed, you can see the change on your stats almost immediately Insights about your audience . Top s...

The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in. And as access to information becomes more widespread and more immediate, the blogosphere is steadily closing that gap. That’s why the Blogger Team is excited to spread the word about Google’s new improvements to Realtime Search, which provide richer and fresher results than ever before. From the new Realtime Search homepage , you can search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as the happen for instant blog post fodder. For more information about Realtime’s new features, please visit www.google.com/landing/realtime.

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations It’s only five days away, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are about the 200+ Meetups that are happening around the world. We’re looking forward to your meetups, and seeing your photos, videos, and tweets from the event. We don’t want to leave the best parties empty-handed, so starting tomorrow we will be sending out some Blogger birthday presents to some of the largest Meetups around the world. We can only send presents to Meetups that have organizers, though, and there’s still lots of fiestas that are organizer-less. It’s super easy and any one can do it, so if you volunteer you may be able to secure presents for your local Meetup. For those of you who haven’t yet joined one of our Meetups, there’s still time! As a reminder, here’s the important details for the event: What : Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration! How : Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town Where : Anywhere you are Who : Everyone! When : ...

Posted by Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu, Software Engineers Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place. Introducing Comment Spam Filtering A blog is an open communications system, inviting conversations from all web users. Unfortunately, spammers have been finding their way into these conversations. To fight spam, some of you enabled moderation of all comments or required word verification or login. While somewhat effective, these checks limit real-time conversations around your blog. To address this, we’ve integrated Google’s spam filtering technologies into the Blogger comment system. Some of you will notice the new “ Comments ” tab. (Note: We are gradually rolling this out to all users, so some of you may not see the new Comments tab ...

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations Last year, Blogger turned ten . We were excited to present you with a (small-but-mighty) bounty of gifts , a token to commemorate all of your contributions over the years. Now we’re a year older (and would like to think a bit wiser), have some great features under our belt and are ready for another celebration with you, our closest friends. For Blogger’s 11th birthday, we’re hosting the first ever Blogger global birthday party! We’ll keep it simple—we set the date, you set the parties and Meetup Everywhere will help facilitate (free of charge!). Through the wonder of Meetup Everywhere, you’ll be able to find other bloggers in your area and either join a celebration that has already been set up or start a new party local to you. The goal is to get together in-person, chat about blogging and celebrate with friends you may have otherwise only met online. Meetups can be simple, and no party is too small. Plus, we’ll be supplying each pa...

Guest post by Oliver Roup, VigLink CEO If you spend as much time working on your blog as we do, you wonder if there's a way to get paid. Many bloggers monetize by selling ads on their site but now there is a way to get paid for your actual content rather than just the ads that go around it. Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word — you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions. VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more th...