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For the past couple of days I’ve been exchanging emails with the creator of Media Dystopia. I noticed his site from my BlogMatcher results and upon reading a few of his seemingly frustrated posts about errors in the Blogger Pro software, I sent him some info on other blogging tools (and found out the Blogger team has put all the fixes on hold for now).

He just informed me that Blogger has been working on a new software package called ‘Dano’ (with an inconspicuous code name: Blogger New [they must have had the Windows NT branding team around during that nomenclature decision]).

The FAQ and Release Notes aren’t too particularly informative. They did mention RSS feeds which will definitely provide a boom to not only news aggregators and meme collectors, but also in developing more of the Semantic Web.

I should note that they are not using RDF/RSS 1.0 as the feed. Apparently they’ve decided to go with Changes.XML, from Userland - and as you can see in this feed, the elements aren’t exactly too descriptive (or helpful for an advanced AI agent). And to reaffirm that conclusion, you quickly read the “How changes.xml works” (note to self: does not look like the Dublin Core, but it’s soooo simple). By the way, the RSS feeds are nothing really new as it has been a feature of Blogger Pro for sometime now.

The ‘Dano’ project looks like it’s only been public for a couple weeks and they haven’t fully migrated existing Blogger Pro users over to it yet (as seen with my correspondence with Dystopia).

Speaking of Blogger Pro, is anyone else confused with how Pyra presented BlogSpot Plus and Blogger Pro? Yea, they are different: BlogSpot Plus offers image hosting and a few other perks (like bStats) and Blogger Pro currently offers all the features you can find in Nucleus or Movable Type. And I suppose you could integrate Pro and Plus to make the Super Duper Blog Combo with or without a cape.

They have a funky pricing structure too (I’m betting TypePad will be alot more straightforward and simplified than the Blogger peeps). Currently you can sign-up for Blogger Pro at a discounted price of $35 (it will go up to $50 when they “officially launch”). Then they impose a posting limit of 100KB/month. After you hit your limit you are charged $3/100KB more. In the month of April my posts alone account for more than 300 KB. Based on their FAQ images do not count against that total, but that’s another story too.

Note: the CNET review they link to from the Blogger Pro FAQ was less than meticulously detailed (yea, not very thorough, plus the reviewer made a small mistake stating “100 MB” instead of “100 KB”).

This is what I know so far: Blogger Pro has a bunch of features, some of which are on hold until ‘Dano’ is officially released. Pyra (or whatever you want to call them now) is in the process of migrating Blogger Pro users over to ‘Dano,’ so those users will still have broken features until some pigs fly. As a Blogger Pro user, you can still utilize the BlogSpot servers for free; however you can’t upload images unless you upgrade to BlogSpot Plus (or if you use your own server).

My question is this, if you’re using your own server why don’t you just migrate to Nucleus or Movable Type? They both can offer the same features and neither group will nickel and dime you (despite some contentions).

Basically, what needs to happen is that Pyra or Google or Chewie needs to streamline what in the world is going on. A list of complete, bug-free features for all the different plans side by side would be great.

As it stands now, the pricing is pretty steep as well, especially the BlogSpot Plus. Googling the term “web host” provides an almost limitless amount of cheaper solutions for hosting blogs (not to mention a certain company that offers the whole enchilada at better rates).

I’m interested in seeing what they will do with ‘Dano,’ my hunch is it is Blogger Pro fixed with a few more features and repackaged with the $50 price tag. Note: still no sign of TrackBack, however they do have a “secret” part of ‘Dano’ as illustrated with the greyed out ’suprise’ box on their Blogger New site.

If you have a blog or visit blogs you’ve probably seen many of those 80 x 15 images that link to RSS feeds and various other topics. A Nucleus blogger by the 1337 h4×0r name: GTMcKnight who has compiled a list of buttons based on this de facto standard, and lists the various creators, one of whom piqued my interest - GnuEconomy.

I mentioned GnuEconomy several weeks ago in my wrapup of the Italian Blog Directories.

Apparently the fine makers of pasta fagioli are also the fine makers of a new integrated browser application called: Blogbar. And fear not, the language barrier is broken down through the use of Google’s translation services (note: Babelfish uses the same software - Systran, so you’ll get the same results either way).

By installing the Blogbar you can now:

1) have a direct link with a choice of popular Italian blogs, its organized alphabetically
2) using your browser you can complete a digitized search with: Google , Google.it Google Images and Google Groups ; Virgilio ; Yahoo! and Yahoo.it ; Altavista and Altavista.it ; Clarence , superEva ; Lycos and Lycos.it ; Astalavista . Ordered at the end is a list from: Google News , Repubblica.it ; Corriere.it and News2000 .
3) Scegliere if to visualize on the bar icone with text or the solos the icone .
4) Uninstall or update Blogbar with a single click from the “Options” menu, without your browser being modified.

I cleaned up some of the text. I’m actually not trying to sell this actual implementation of the service, but the idea behind it. If someone could create a similar toolbar for IE, Mozilla, Opera, etc. in English for bloggers… that’d be gravy. Installing it is simple enough (just like installing anything else), upgrading is a snap too.

I installed it quickly on IE 6. It has:

- a Resource tab with various Blog Indices and tools to help you keep track of the latest and greatest in the Blogosphere.
- a Icon-Text button which simplifies the layout (Icons with and without text), shrinking the overall footprint on your browser window
- a pull-down tab with all the major search engines (Opera has a similar tab), to the left of this tab is the query box - just fill it in with “Why Does Anyone Speak Esperanto” and choose the search engine of your choice
- an alphabetized list of popular blogs (the Italian ‘A-list’ apparently)

The only thing that was not intuitive and I still haven’t figured out is how to modify the alphabetized lists with blogs you would like to view. I’m sure Giornalismo&Giornalismi are pretty cool, but I’d like to see GeneralismoGTMcKnight instead, or in addition to that list.

I’ll go ahead and make ‘First Contact’ with the developer and see if we can’t get an Anglo-cized version of this developed soon. Let me know if you’d like to work on it or if you are interested in using it (RSS Readers are fun, but blog integration is even phuner).