I must admit to succumbing to a temptation I've had for a long time. I went ahead and created a Blogger account for a new (experimental for now) Cricket blog, currently titled Forward Point. Since I already had a gmail account, it was just a matter of a single click and my blog was ready.

There are several great features I found in the new Blogger (which is no longer beta). I must admit that it's rich in features and extremely easy to use. Push-button publishing it definitely is. Here are some of the enhancements from the older blogger which wasn't integrated with the google account:

• Tags or labels for posts. In effect these act as categories - something that was missing in the old blogger and which I thought was a huge limitation.
• Straightforward tempate editing. Users no longer have to mess with HTML and CSS to make layout and colour customizations on their blogs. To edit a theme, you now have a visual layout editor and a colour picking palette. Most lay people will love this feature and even advanced users will appreciate the easy and rapidity with which a theme can be modified.
• Custom layout elements/widgets. This is definitely a way of adding and enhancing the informational and interactive features of a blog. Although I haven't experimented with it much, it looks quite promising. It even features AdSense, so any blogger can easily display google ads on his blog without messing about with copy/pasting JavaScript code.
• Integration with other google services. I suspect this will be the biggest selling point for the new Blogger. Any person with an existing google account can easily create a blog in addition to so many other rich web services available - gmail, google pages, google documents and spreadsheets, Picasa and so on. In short, almost everything you need from google is available with a unified login system.

Add to all this a huge and active community and you get a complete picture. There's no doubt that google are extremely eager in maintaining their dominance in the blog world and it's fairly easy to see why almost everybody has a blogspot address these days. The user-friendly features may look a bit silly to the technically more proficient users, but they're fun tools to use (particularly the instant template editing) and definitely enhance the blogging experience.

The only downside (as far as I can see) is the lack of a large number of pre-built templates. However, because of the template editing features every blog can be fairly customized with a little effort. Full HTML editing is still available for the more advanced users.

Even though I will continue to hold to my opinion that WordPress is the best blogging platform for the more experienced (in terms of sheer customizability, size of the support community and availability of a huge number of themes and plugins), I think Blogger definitely will remain the most popular blogging tool for the less geeky crowd.