Have you seen the blogger craziness? Templates, comments.
I have the feeling that Google/Blogger is trying to create a community similar to the Live Journal folks. They have a ways to go, although I was playing around in the “edit profile” section of blogger and there are more than a few features that mimic things that LJ has been doing for a while. You can put interests into a text field and then they become hotlinks in your profile that link you up with other users. Crazy. I remember when I used to edit the HTML by hand and just post the index. On occasion, I’d remember to stick it in a non searchable archive, which was just a renamed index.html file.
Now I’m thinking about using one of their templates, or at least tweaking one into something that I’d like, and enabling comments for registered blogger users.
With my use of Gmail, I’m starting to feel like I’m being watched by a single, monolithic corporate entity that feeds on text.
Part of me rejects this community building, and wants to emigrate to some homebrew blogging application. The other part really likes the fruity filling new features. Going corporate and joining “the family” certainly appears to have its benefits.