Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here).

Update (9 October 2009): this article in Dutch reveals Buma/Stemra has put its foot in its mouth and decided to withdraw from trying to impose fines on individuals who embed music videos, stating they’ll only target ‘commercial’ users after all. Caveat: The association says every website that has ads on it is a commercial venture, which means if your Blogger blog has Google ads on it, you could still be on their radar.

These fees, which will become effective 1 January 2010, were laid out in this brochure (PDF in Dutch) and are, according to the director of Buma/Stemra, calculated based on the fees they currently charge for offline music playback such as copyrighted background music in bakeries and the likes. The fees amount up to €130 ($191) for up to six embedded files, €260 ($383) for up to twelve, and if you embed over thirty files you will be liable for €650 ($957) per thirty or part thereof (i.e. 31 embedded files on your site will set you back €1300 or roughly $1914).

Because God forbid you might want to provide their right holders with a bigger audience for their music and potential new fans who would buy their albums and pay to attend their live performances. The horror!

The association did say that they do not intend to ‘chase’ individual bloggers, but also added that they will not be excluding them from eventual fines either. In an extraordinary act of compassion, they intend to give naughty embedders the chance to take the material down before going after their wallets. Buma/Stemra is currently also trying to start conversations with Google (YouTube, Blogger) and local blogging platform providers like Hyves to try and get financial compensation for them for the distribution of copyrighted material by their users, but so far hasn’t reached any agreements with either party.

Fortunately, several political parties in The Netherlands have already stated that they are concerned about Buma/Stemra’s intentions, posing questions about the juridical grounds for the new licensing fees and publicly wondering if it’s actually a smart idea to refrain music fans from spreading the work of their favorite artists.

Let’s hope common sense prevails.

So we can all keep enjoying this video clip of Dutch rock band Golden Earring, with ‘When the lady smiles’.

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Squarespace’s new blog importing tool supports most of the main publishing platforms; Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type. After entering your login credentials, the Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. Squarespace is also working directly with Amazon S3 — Squarespace will bring all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to Squarespace’s Amazon S3 account. For users who want to retain custom domains, Squarespace will use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts automatically.

Squarespace’s founder, Anthony Casalena tells us that Squarespace submitted an iPhone application to the App Store two weeks ago, which hasn’t been approved yet and should be coming “soon.” Also, this is the only current way to exit a self-hosted site right now. This importing tool is a big plus for any blogger wanting to move over to Squarespace, because you keep your SEO and page ranks, as well as all your content.

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Unless it wasn’t actually the blogging equivalent of junk mail but just some overanxious Googler who was so thrilled with some new feature they’re adding to the free blogging service that he/she resorted to gobbledygook speak out of sheer excitement. Or maybe this person was still a bit tipsy from the 10-year anniversary get-together.

We’ll never know, and the post has since been removed.

But someone (or something) was definitely trying to make contact there.

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Yes, on Sunday, Blogger turns 10 years old. And to celebrate, the Blogger team (which is now a part of Google following a 2003 acquisition) is promising a bunch of gifts to users in the form of new features. Without naming anything specifically, Blogger points to this list as a good reference point for some of what they’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. Of note on that list are a better commenting system and WordPress-style pages (About page, etc).

It’s worth noting that Blogger’s roots are deeply tied to the new hot web platform of choice: Twitter. Pyra Labs was co-founded by Evan Williams, who is now the CEO (and co-founder) of Twitter. Also a part of Pyra Labs were Jason Goldman who now runs product development for Twitter, and Jason Shellen who now runs Thing Labs, the makers of Brizzly, a much buzzed-about new Twitter client.

Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, joined the Blogger team at Google before leaving with Williams in 2004 to start Obvious Corp. which would eventually birth and turn into Twitter. (An interesting side note is that Williams’ Pyra co-founder Meg Hourihan, eventually married Jason Kottke, who is best known as being one of the web’s most popular bloggers.)

These days, while the web is abuzz over Twitter, no one really talks much about Blogger despite millions of people using it everyday. The fact is that as a platform, it has fallen behind the more nimble blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr in recent years. Still, in terms of straight up simplicity in setting up a blog, it’s easy to see why Blogger is still popular among users (and, unfortunately, spammers).

Update: As as Faridur notes in the comments, current Twitter Creative Director Douglas Bowman also worked on the Blogger team back in the day.

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Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

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Google’s blog publishing platform, Blogger, is bringing its Custom Search Box gadget out of its beta version, also known as Blogger in Draft. The search gadget a blog’s readers search posts, web pages linked from the blog, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list.

Google initially launched the gadget on its Blogger in Draft platform, which offers users a version of Blogger where Google tests out features and new interfaces. Google says it has upgraded the search gadget to provide simpler defaults as well as the ability for the box to integrate with the aesthetics and color of your blog. The Search Box gadget uses AJAX Search APIs to power the feature and also automatically updates the custom linked search engine when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists.

Custom search can be a useful tool for blogs because it allows readers to not only search a blog’s content but also any pages or favored sites that are linked to, giving readers a related, but still-focused, search experience.

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Blogs that you follow will be listed in your Blogger profile and the integration will also leverage existing relationships, meaning you’ll be able to quickly see if your friends are also following those blogs.

The integration was announced on Google’s new Social Web Blog, and the post promises more goodies in the future:

And this is just the first step in the integration, so be sure to stay tuned for further improvements, including an easy way to add OpenSocial gadgets through Blogger and the integration of the commenting features.

Here’s a video:

Just two weeks ago, Google introduced what it calls the Social Bar, a way for webmasters to include a small strip on top of their web pages and to enable them to add links for drop-down gadgets that lets visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, etc.

Google Friend Connect, which is the company’s own data portability effort, was opened up for all websites in the beginning of December 2008, right when Facebook made Facebook Connect generally available as well.

And thus, the battle for who will control access to your online identity continues. My guess is it’ll go on for a while before someone can be declared the winner, if at all.

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The defamation suit, filed in Manhattan, seeks a court order compelling Google and its Blogger service to identify the anonymous blogger. Google declined to discuss any specifics, only responding to the claim by saying they sympathize with victims of cyberbullying but “take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order”, so we’ll leave you with a quote from Cohen instead:

“I’m tall, I’m blond, I’ve been modeling for many years, and people get jealous,” she said. “If I had to deal with everyone who is jealous, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”

While some people are quick to dismiss that the model would have a case, and that she’s just looking for attention, I’m not so sure. It’s nearly impossible to identify bloggers who don’t reveal their real name without the help of the companies that maintain publishing platforms, and a line has to be drawn somewhere regarding what people can say anonymously just because they’re using the internet to say it.

The attacks on the blog are rather personal and vicious, and they’re targetting Cohen almost exclusively. As Ars Technica points out, the model will need to demonstrate defamation twice: once to show that she has a sufficient case that the identity of the blogger should be unmasked, and then again for suing the blogger directly.

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What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

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Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.

By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger dashboard.

Since Blogger is owned and run by Google, the posts from the blogs you follow on Blogger can also be accessed with Google Reader in a special “Blogs I’m Following” section.

While the new following feature will be useful for staying on top of your favorite content, the main benefit to Blogger will come from introducing a better sense of community, one that can be built out gradually into a more functional social network. The Blogger team has already announced its intention to implement Google Friend Connect throughout the blog network, so it’s definitely heading further in this direction.

On the one hand, this new feature roll out can be seen as just an attempt to stay competitive with Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have already developed social features of their own (and the former of which has run into the arms of Google’s social networking nemesis, Facebook).

But Google also conspicuously lacks a social network with any significant amount of popularity in the United States (Orkut hasn’t made much headway here). So perhaps it has decided to pin much of its social networking hopes on Blogger, which could be leveraged to bolster the usage of Google Friend Connect and eventually OpenSocial as well.

If you’re a Blogger user and don’t see the new following feature yet, you may have to wait a few weeks – they are rolling it out gradually.

[News via The Social]

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More significantly, Blogger now supports right to left writing as well for Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.

Blogs in Arabic and Persian have been hosted by Blogger from its pre-Google days, so it’s surprising that the service is only now officially supporting the languages.

The Middle East presents strong growth opportunities for Google and other companies as younger generations embrace the internet. Even in more closed countries such as Iran, blogging has long been popular and Blogger has often been the platform of choice. Bloggers in many Middle Eastern countries blog at their own risk, with sites regularly becoming blocked or as is the case in countries such as Saudi Arabia, bloggers are arrested and jailed.

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Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year.

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Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code “bX-uxu3fu,” and were unable to read their blogs, or log in to the backend. No further details are available as Blogger employees have not responded to the official Blogger forum at the time of writing with a response. We’ll update the post if we find out more.

I did try clicking on a few of the blogs highlighted as being updated from the front page of Blogger, and from five attempts I managed to visit five spam blogs, so at least some of the biggest users of Blogger don’t seem to be affected by this issue

Update: reports that most of Blogger is back up from around 6:45pm PST. Still no word as to what went wrong.

(via Paris Lemon on Twitter, who’s blog is also down)

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The new service will allow anyone with an OpenID account, including LiveJournal and TypeKey services to log in and validate a comment on blogs running under the Blogger in Draft service. Google notes that the feature is a test and that they will seek user feedback, but all things being equal this will end up being provided on Blogger itself.

The bigger news, particularly for rabid OpenID advocates is a suggestion from Google that they are “working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web,” which sounds a lot like code for Google is looking at turning Blogger logins into OpenID log ins in a similar way that AOL did with its user base.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know who is driving this, and Google even drops a hint in the example link: “http://brad.livejournal.com/”; LiveJournal founder and former SixApart employee Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google in August and is credited as the founder of OpenID.

OpenID advocates are passionate about the potential of the idea, but despite the noise and companies such as Digg, Yahoo and even to some extent Microsoft adopting OpenID it has failed to capture the broader public’s imagination. If the 1000 pound Gorilla in the room decides to adopt OpenID across its range of products, presumably with Blogger being only the first step of a broader rollout, OpenID may finally take off outside of the first adopter and tech communities.

Thanks to David for the tip

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Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

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A new blog (also on Blogger) has gone up that chronicles the back and forth between Google and the author (well, it’s one way communication, actually).

Facebook’s statement on the matter came down to “it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook” and “the reprinting of this code violates several laws.” We disagreed on both points – the leak provided information to potential hackers as to potential security holes, and the fact that Facebook accidentally released the code themselves on their site may have made it very difficult for them to claim protection under the law.

That being said, it’s unlikely the anonymous author of the blog would be around to defend his/her position. I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

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The key changes include the addition of tags, which Google has always called “labels,” and an option to create a private blog. You can also now sign into your blogger account using your Google credentials, and Google has made editing the template and posts significantly more user friendly.

None of these changes put Blogger ahead of its primary competitors. For example, SixApart’s Comet product allows not only for private blogs, but privacy setting can also be changed for each post. but it is a sign of hope for Blogger users who’ve been stuck with last generation software for years.

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