Death of Beta.

Thanks to Lifehacker, this evening I note that Google have now completely rolled out their new version of Blogger. The little beta tag that caused some of our student bloggers so much trouble has been retired. In fact it has been neatly crossed out.

I noticed the Blogger beta version back in the summer. It is a giant amongst the free blogging platforms with much to offer. It provides painless entry into the blogosphere without an understanding of HTML, useful for the many digital immigrants amongst us. The drag and drop templates, easily applied labels and WYSIWYG post creator are ideal for use in educational settings.
Purists will argue that lack of understanding of HTML is a bad thing, I suspect that there is some truth in their thinking. My knowledge of HTML is slight but I know enough to understand what the new Blogger offers.

Making a post, or leaving a comment in a Blogger is so much easier than posting to the University Blogs!

While I am not really a fan of large organisations (as small is always beautiful); the closely linked diagnostic tools additionally offered by Google are bound to be of use to educational bloggers who wish to analyse the usefuless and readership of their site. Blog authors need to be aware of their readership, not in terms of numbers but in terms of identity.

So far in our blogging experiment we have no grumbles about the new Blogger. Our 130 students created and maintained their blogs fairly effortlessly. Whether they used them effectively is another question for another post. Whether they appreciated the potential of the medium is another question for anothe post.

From a personal point of view I am looking forward to a new Blog This button for Firefox.
But I can wait.
Its not as if I blog much.