Google Fixes Blogger Flaws; Adds Video Support

Blogger, Google's free blogging service, underwent some updates this week, the first of which involved a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service and introduced a new feature that gives publishers the ability to upload videos to their sites.

Publishers who use Blogger had been experiencing trouble performing various editing and posting operations last Monday and Tuesday. Google was quick to notice and repair this issue, as it was no longer a concern by Wednesday.

Wednesday, however, was the day that Blogger and the Blogspot hosting platform suffered an outage that lasted little over an hour. Apparently this setback affected the entire community of hosted bloggers.

The downtime affected several bloggers who were trying to update or add posts, including Lisa Kasanicky. According to PC World Magazine, Kasanicky tried several times to post to her blog Tuesday morning, but instead got an increasing number of server code errors. Despite the inconvenience, she still stated that "I'm not giving up on Blogger. It's a Google product, and I'm a big fan of what they do. I know they perfect things."

It seemed like a hard week for the Blogger team, getting everything back up and running, especially since all of this occurred just before the 8th birthday of Blogger, which was on Thursday.

To make up for everything, and to attract new users, Google announced the addition of a video upload feature on Friday, via the Official Blogger Buzz blog.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila!

This new feature will make uploading videos as simple as the YouTube process, and will provide the same ease as photo uploading, according to Google. This should make it much easier for bloggers to become video podcasters, which has really taken off now.