Blogger Pro demo

Robert Scoble is at the Weblogger Interest Group meeting in Mountain View, and they're getting a demo of Blogger Pro from Evan Williams. Here are his notes.

Title field. Major request. Not by default.

Settings page is much different. More options. Works better.

Two new attributes for post: Draft. Like an email draft. Won't be published. Set time and date of post. If you have lots of things to say today and want to spread it out you can. You can publish at a specific time.

Blogger is still chronological, but you can cheat by putting a different time on a post so it can go at the top of your page.

Images. Automatically posts inline images. Very cool.

Spell checker included.

Publishing via FTP is coming.

Pinging weblogs.com is now done automatically.

There are now 92 different languages supported, dates and times.

No RSS.

You can broadcast your weblog via email. Single address to mail your post to. No mailing list built in the product. You send your email to a Yahoo group and let Yahoo do the work of mailing to all your friends. You can use any service you want (not just Yahoo).

Post template. Basically stuff that's preloaded in the posting field when you go to post. It's usually a formatting thing. If you have a common format you can load it here. That way you can load things in a table every day or with a specific font.

Seamless to switch to for existing Blogger users. Just a different front end.

Secure logins. If you log in it'll be via SSL.

Not allowing commercial use of free Blogger.

How much is it? $30 a year (eventually will be $50 a year). You can have a dozen blogs, but there is a posting limit. 100k per month for that price.

There's a team blog concept that he didn't demo that.