“A court in Dallas, Texas has found a website operator liable for copyright infringement because his site linked to an ‘audio webcast’ without permission. Observers have criticised the judge for failing to understand the internet.”

The case entails that webmasters linking to other websites may be violating copyright laws if the company or webmaster of the site you are linking to doesn’t approve of his/her URL or site name being on your site.

I think it’s totally ridiculous that a case like this even made it to court; even worse that the judge was in favor of the prosecutor. I really think that Internet-related issues should be handled by a different body of courts and judges; ones that are educated as webmasters.

Since i started blogging heavily about 18 months ago i have been an avid blogger user. I sang it’s praises and i encouraged everyone to use it. It was quick, Easy to use, Highly cutomizable and allowed me to create two fairly popular blogs for free. So you can imagine my delight when i heard that Blogger were in the process or adding a bunch of new features to their popular stable blogging platform.

It wasn’t long before “blogger Beta” was around and people were being moved over to it. At first i was a little hesitant about moving over, Just incase it completely sucked. Then one day i thought “what the heck” and moved my blogs over, Blogger isn’t going to suck, Is it?

It took me about 30 seconds to realize my mistake, by which time it was too late. The new blogger, Which i had been looking forward to, did in fact suck, And I’m not talking about sucking a little, It sucked like it’s life depended on it.

The New Blogger Template

The first thing that amazed me (in a bad way) was how complicated the template now was. On the old blogger, Creating your own template was as simple as coding a page and dropping some tags in it. the new template however required you to invite Stephen Hawkins over, Borrow Deep Blue and go to a 4 day seminar at blogger at end of which you were debriefed and sworn to secrecy. After that, And only after that, You may have a tiny chance of actually understanding what the hell is going on.

Old Tags = New Functions

I soon forgot about the template issue, I could always get someone to make one for me. It was then that the second issue crept up on me and punched me in the face. The second issue was that old tags had taken on new functions. Instead of creating a new tag to handle the new functions blogger had thought it’s better to hijack old tags and make them do something completely new.

<$BlogPreviousItemTitle$> - What do you think this tag should do? Link to the “previous item”? That’s right, And that’s what it used to do. Now, However, It links to the newest item.
The same thing happens when that tag is looped in the sidebar, It used to list the previous items, But now lists the latest items.

<$BlogURL$> - Wouldn’t it be great if this tag linked to blogname.blogspot.com? yeah, It would. Shame it now links to blogname.blogspot.com/index.html then isn’t it. This a completely pointless change which actually may cause problems for SEO. The RSS feeds now also link to the index.html file too. Bye bye backlinks!

Predictive Tags

One feature of the new blogger that i was looking forward to was their use of tags (labels). These things are great, they let you organize your pages in to groups. yet on blogger if you type a tag once it assumes that would want to type that tag again. If you had previously entered the tag “Google Adsense” and then next time you want to enter the label “Google” it tries to force you to enter the Google Adsense again. Something as simple a typing a single word suddenly becomes a long drawn out frustrating ordeal.

Bloggers NOINDEX Meta Tag

The final issue, Which only came to light a few days ago, Is that blogger are now randomly adding the following meta tag to your blogs via <$BlogMetaData$>.
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

For those who don’t know, The above meta tag tells search engines not to index that page and not to follow any links on it. What a fantastic idea, Who wants their blog in search engines anyway. Who would have thought that blogger is owned by Google.

Summary and advice

Don’t use blogger. Download wordpress, Get a domain name and do it yourself. You will only end up regretting using blogger if your blog becomes popular.