Google’s Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It's interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's testing ground/sandbox site.

YouTube Changes Default Size on Embeds

YouTube has changed the default size for embedded videos. By default they're getting bigger at either 480x385 for a 4:3 video, or 640x385 for a 16:9 video. YouTube says it went with these sizes, because they will give most viewers the best viewing experience because they better match current video encoding sizes.

"A video's life on YouTube is just the beginning; embedding gives it a life off of the site. Just look at your favorite blogger and they're likely to be embedding YouTube content in their posts," says YouTube Senior Web Developer Geoff Stearns. "In fact, almost every popular video on the site is first made famous by embeds on the Web. That number can be as high as 50% of views in the first 48 hours, kicking off a great cycle."

"When using the 'Play in HD' option, it's best to embed the player at a very large size (at least 1280x745) in order to accommodate the large size of the video," says Stearns. "If you play HD video in a small player, the user's computer will have to scale down the video to fit within the player, costing the user extra CPU cycles and bandwidth, which may result in choppy playback. It's always best to play the video size that best fits the size of the video player. And if you want even better performance when watching HD content, you can choose to watch it in full-screen."

When users click the embed code, on a video page, they will be able to choose the following for the video player:

- The color and size
- Whether or not to include related videos
- Whether or not to display the player border
- Whether or not to play in HD by default -- triggers video resolutions of 1280x720 (720p) or 1920x1080 (1080p)

This week YouTube also expanded its auto-captioning program. This is a tool  that combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms from Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by viewers. More on that here.

Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy

Update 2:  Google offered the following statement: "Buzz can only expand to show whatever was in the underlying feed. For example, if an item is truncated in the feed to only include 200 characters, then Buzz will only show 200 characters."

So, in other words, Bloggers can prevent their full content from showing in Buzz just like in a reader, depending on how they set up their feed.

Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I've inquired further. We'll keep you posted.

Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we've mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They've also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we're hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn't be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn't change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google's part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers' content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay's story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We've contacted Google for comment on this (we'll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author's control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this...again, we'll post a response when we receive it).

Does Google Buzz Deserve All the Criticism It’s Gotten?

Google Buzz has been a magnet for skepticism, controversy, and criticism since it launched earlier this month. The skepticism is a result of past Google social media efforts not having the greatest track record. Much of the controversy and criticism has been the result of privacy, and more recently copyright concerns from users.

Google Buzz launched with auto-following, and among countless other complaints, that led to one woman complaining about being re-connected with her abusive ex-husband, just because they had previous correspondence through Gmail. Google addressed this, and has made various changes to Buzz since launch based on user feedback.

This week, blogger Jesse Stay raised the issue of content being shared on Buzz without the ads that go with it, while Google shows its own ads. Google quickly responded to this as well, saying that they expected to have the issue fixed by next week.

For all the criticism, there are still plenty of people out there that view Buzz as a good tool, and a step in the right direction from Google, with regards to social media. Some even think the extensive criticism has gone a bit further than Google deserves.

"As a big company, Google has an incredible microscope focused on their every activity," Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray tells WebProNews. "Those people who are naturally distrusting of large companies with high market share are aggressively looking for ways to highlight weakness or issues with Google Buzz. While Google no doubt made some early missteps, and has apologized for them, the reaction has far outweighed the potential issues."

A common sentiment seen throughout the Blogosphere is that Google simply rushed Google Buzz out a little quicker than it should have. Even many of Buzz's critics have no problem admitting that Buzz has a great deal of potential to thrive. I discussed this potential at length upon the launch of the service.

Right out of the box, it seemed clear that Google was onto something with Buzz that it had not been able to tap into before - a way of taking its existing services and building its own social network in and around those - a strategy some of us have been expecting for quite some time. Buzz quickly drew in users (some didn't have much of a choice if they were Gmail users).

It's important to consider that Buzz hasn't even been around for an entire month yet. It's already gotten tons of publicity (even though some has been negative, Google has been pretty good about turning much of that around). Publishers and bloggers have been quick to jump on the Buzz bandwagon and promote their Buzz profiles. How long did it take people to "get" Twitter? Some people still haven't gotten there.

Google will be integrating Buzz into more of its products, and will no doubt be adding more useful features as time goes on, most likely making it more appealing to users. It's just in Google's nature to crank out new features for its products. The biggest advantage Google has with Buzz is that Google already has so many users among all of its products, and ultimately, it can put Buzz wherever it wants. I have a feeling Buzz has barely scratched the surface of what it will be. But we'll see.

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