Google Blogger is selecting a group of current users to test out the new Blogger Beta system, which includes among others dynamic serving.

When Google acquire Pyra Labs service, Blogger might be an elegant and one of the best instant content publishing platform. Other blog software may be easy to use, but none of them surpass what Blogger could offer. Anyone can register an account and immediately publish in as little as a few minutes.

Things change. Nowadays even installing blogware on a hosting account using a standalone domain is not difficult. Add to that the availability of more dynamic and feature-loaded free blog account, Blogger becomes less and less favorite blogging platform.

While I still suggest Blogger as one of platforms of choice for beginners besides WordPress and Movable Type, there are things Blogger still need to improve.

Fortunately, Google is listening. They are rolling out a beta version of the new Blogger soon. Existing bloggers need to switch to get new features. Best of all, Blogger account remains free.

In the future, Blogger account will be integrated into Google Accounts. Neat. Here comes another privacy concern storm again.

Here are highlights of new features in Blogger beta:

• Dynamic serving: Blogger and the entire underlying structure of Blog*Spot is going to change but invisible to users. Blogger used to create static HTML files on Blog*Spot or your hosting account every time you published. The future version of Blogger will run entirely from database. Unfortunately, the dynamic serving will only work if you serve your blog from Blog*Spot.
• Access control: You can choose to whether allow selected group of people to view your blog or allow everyone else to have access.
• Labels: This is Blogger’s answer to categorization. In fact, they are the same thing but dynamic. Instead of defining a set of categories for your blog, you tag labels as you see fit on the fly when publishing a blog post.
• More site feed options: In addition to the usual feed of your blog posts, you can have a feed for all comments on your blog and separate feed for comments on each separate post.
• Improved dashboard: Blogger has improved user interface and usability as well.

Blogger will still work using FTP and SFTP to publish blog posts to your domain, but without much of the features available on the new version.

Now, I always recommend business bloggers to use a standalone domain instead of blogspot.com to host their blog for various reasons. If these updates left too much features for you to miss, then you might consider switching to WordPress or Movable Type.

Source: Blogger Buzz.