Whoah...New Blogger Look and Feel

You can't tell by reading this but there is a new management interface here on Blogger. Apparently, Blogger has been at work on this new system for a while. Frankly, it is going to take some getting used to.

Read the explanation here on the Blogger Buzz Blog:

It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time.

I'll let you know how it goes...I'm still getting used to my iPhone.

I'm a spam blogger! No, wait...

I woke up this morning to find an email from Blogger that this blog had been flagged as spam. Nervous that the email was a phishing attack, I logged into my Blogger account separately and found this post on the Blogger blog:

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

First, this is kind of a rookie mistake, eh? Second, this is a pretty well written, effective message that takes responsibility. Third, an email to accompany and negate the first one would have been nice and saved me some freak out time.

What do you think?

Straight to the Point- Now with Three Columns!

As you may have noticed, I now have three columns on this blog. I bet you are wondering, wow, that's exciting, why did he do that?

Well, let me tell you.

I have been of the opinion that the content of blog determine, in part, its value. Content, in my case, is the words that communicate an idea. The main idea of my blog is to highlight the fundamental changes going on the public relations industry as it is transformed by the impact of so-called web 2.0 technology (social media, blogs, twitter, etc) from the slightly critical perspective of a early mainstream adopter. As you can tell, I'll post about technology and business news as well, but this is the main thrust of the blog.

So why, three columns? When I started up this blog over a year ago, I wanted to make sure the focus was on the words, so I avoided any templates that were too graphics heavy. I picked a plain vanilla Minima Lefty template from Blogger. It's simple and clean. Now, I've added a bunch of widgets and other crap to the site over time that have pushed that content waaay down the page, which kind of bothered me.

The other day, one of our client teams was asking if anyone know anything about converting a two column Blogger template into a three column one. I volunteered to be the guinea pig. Voila!

Just for your edification, a step by step is located here: http://bguide.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-columns-minima-left-and-right.html

It's actually a fairly simple process, but since I'm almost completely ignorant of coding above a very simple level, it took me about two hours. If you have any skill at all, block out about five minutes.

So, tell me what you think? Better? Worse? Should I add color? Should I stop blogging? ;)