…because “in Draft” sounds cooler than BETA.

Yes, Blogger is at it again. Releasing new and (sometimes) exciting features. I took a bit of a spin with it today to see what is up.

The major additions are in regards to some of the rougher bits of Blogger 3.0 – the template WYSIWYG template editor.  Some sorts of widgets have been sorely lacking for some time.  Subscription links (for feeds) are new trivial to add to one’s Blogger sidebar.  Better for hackers, Google Gadgets can now be directly added.  The fact that this comes so close on the heels of OpenSocial is doubtfully a coincidence.  This opens Blogger up to a large number of new functionalities instantly.  Other new widgets include a search box, polls, and a sideshow widget for photos.

Videos are now just as trivial to add to posts as images.  A loss useful feature, but cool none the less.

Now for my favourite and most exciting feature – OpenID!  Yes, you read it correctly, the new Blogger (which could doubtless be dubbed Blogger 4.0) has support for leaving comments using OpenID!

This is exciting for a number of reasons, but largest of all is that this will soon expose THOUSANDS of people to OpenID.  This could easily take it from a geek tech to mainstream knowledge.