Today, Google made the announcement, but it’s only for Blogger blogs, at least at this point. The feature can be enabled from the Blogger dashboard.

“Now when you’re browsing your blog’s comment threads, you’ll see activity from direct visitors, and from people talking about your content on Google+,” says Google Principal Engineer Yonatan Zunger . “For example, if there’s a public Google+ discussion about one of your blog entries, those comments and replies will also appear on your Blogger blog. This way you can engage with more of your readers, all in one place.”

“Your blog readers will now have the option to comment publicly, or privately to their circles on Google+,” adds Zunger. “And when they’re browsing blog comments, they can view all of them, just the top ones, or only those from the people in their circles.”

Everyone will, of course, only see the comments they have permission to see.

Facebook has had a similar offering for quite some time, and it’s a bit surprising that it’s taken Google this long to offer something, and still only for Blogger.

You can see the feature in action here.

In a post on the Blogger Buzz blog, Google software engineers Samantha Schaffer and Renee Kwang walk you through the steps for moving the date of a blog post from above the post title to underneath it, as an example.

“Finally, we’ve added a ‘format template’ button that automatically cleans up the indentation of the template, and made it possible to search for text by pressing ‘Ctrl+F’ once you’ve clicked into the editor,” they write. “To find and replace text occurrences one by one, use ‘Ctrl+Shift+F’ or to find and replace all occurrences at once, use ‘Ctrl+Shift+R’.”

According to the engineers, this project was conceived as part of Google Australia’s BOLD Diversity Internship Program.

Kári Ragnarsson from Google’s The Data Liberation Front wrote on the Data Liberation Front blog:

Meet us at https://www.google.com/takeout, and together we will export each of your blogs as an Atom Xml file. Or, if you’ve enjoyed exporting data from your Google+ Stream and Google+ Circles through Takeout in the past, but are looking for something more, join us now and download html files with your posts and json files containing the circles for each Google+ Page you own. If you don’t want to rush into things, we can also just export a single blog or page of your choice. Either way, give us a try. Life will never be the same.

A couple months ago, Google added some new features to Google Takeout, enabling users to maintain their original folder hierarchy when exporting files from Google Drive, and letting users pick a single resource within a service to download.

“For instance, a single Picasa album or top-level folder from Drive – instead of exporting every single file,” Google explained at the time. “To try it out, go to the ‘Choose services’ tab and click on ‘Configure…’ once you’ve added a service that supports this.”

Google also recently added Reader and Latitude data to the Google Takeout menu, and started letting users download all their YouTube videos together.

Hat tip to The Verge

“It also contains the addition of Google Analytics for application usage statistics, updated save post options to ‘Save as draft’, ‘Publish’ or ‘Cancel’, and some minor bug fixes including an issue with Japanese keyboards,” says Blogger in an announcement on Google+ (h/t: TechnologyTell).

Here’s what it looks like:

Last month, Google launched a major redesign of its Blogger app for both Android and iOS. This included landscape support for post composition, the ability to share to Google+, and the ability to view a scheduled post time. It also launched in over 30 additional languages.

The gadget, which looks similar to Google Friend Connect, highlights your total Google+ audience. Of course, it also provides a follow button.

“As a result, you can grow your readership across the web, and reach them either in the Google+ stream, or through your blog,” Google says.

“Those of you with the Google Friend Connect followers gadget can keep using it, if you like,” the company adds. “We retired most of Friend Connect earlier this year, but we’ll keep it running on Blogger for the foreseeable future.”

You can learn more about connecting your Blogger blog to Google+ here. You can start by going to the “Layout” tab in the Blogger dashboard, and selecting “Add a Gadget”.

Blogger and Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are at it again. After the two stepped back from Twitter, they resurrected their startup Obvious. A few months ago, Stone told us about Medium. Kind of. Details were vague. Here’s a snippet of what he said at the time:

Thirteen years ago we helped democratize publishing with a web-native approach called blogging. That was a long time ago and everything is different now—social networks, mobile devices, you name it. We felt compelled to build a content network for the technology age we’re living in now, and we have a vision for what publishing should be.

Putting ideas on the Internet is great, it makes them available to more people. However, printing words on a screen like we do on paper doesn’t take advantage of the fact that we’re all networked and using powerful computers. There is so much room for improvement and innovation in the publishing space right now because it’s operating on outdated legacy concepts. Everything from the way we consume content to how that content is created needs re-imagining.

In late October, Williams shared a little more:

It’s not too late to rethink how online publishing works and build a system optimized for quality, rather than popularity. Where anyone can have a voice but where one has to earn the right to your attention. A system where people work together to make a difference, rather than merely compete for validation and recognition. A world where thought and craftsmanship is rewarded more than knee-jerk reactions.

Truth be told, we’re just starting the journey of figuring out what all that means. We have an amazing team with a ton of relevant experience, but we’ve built just a sliver of what we have in mind. And we know it will be a learning process as we go.

Still not much in the way of details. What the hell are these guys doing this time? Well, finally, Williams has provided some details. They’re creating a form of web writing/publishing where the WSYIWYG interface is actually what you get.

If you think about writing and editing a blog in edit mode, the edit mode, would also be the product. Of course, much like with Twitter, they seem to be going for the simplicity approach. Here’s what it looks like (so far). It’s a screenshot of Williams’ post:

Medium’s editor gives the user few options, and that appears to be the point. Simplicity. In the way of formatting, you can use bold, italics, H1, H2, blockquotes and links. You can add pictures. That’s about it. A few more options may be added, but consider how simple Twitter stayed while these guys were running the show (even if it’s evolved significantly since then).

It would be easy to sit here and say, “So, that’s it?” To be perfectly blunt, the whole thing seems a little underwhelming on the surface. It basically sounds like blogging with less features. However, I can also distinctly remember a time when Twitter largely faced a similar reaction from the masses. Now, look at it. These guys have a proven track record for this kind of thing, so I would not be so quick to dismiss what they’re up to.

Check out Medium. You can sign up, but you can’t use it to publish yet (apparently unless you work at Twitter).

The new apps include landscape support for post composition. This is good news. Who really likes composing a blog post in mobile in portrait?

They’ve added the ability to share to Google+. Frankly, I’m very surprised this was not already a feature, considering how much Google has been integrating Google+ into its various products, but it is an ongoing process. One step at a time.

They’ve added the ability to view a scheduled post time, and added international support in over 30 languages. Finally, the iOS app supports the iPad.

With Google, you have a specific process to follow to be included in its authorship program, which gets your picture in the search results and helps Google associate you with content you contribute to various sites. There was nothing like this mentioned in Bing’s blog post, so we reached out to find out a little more about how this works.

A spokesperson for Bing tells WebPronews, “People Who Know are experts and enthusiasts from leading sites and social networks like Twitter, foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger. Bing identifies ‘People Who Know’ based on what they’ve written or tweeted about. Author pages surface information from our experts/enthusiasts Twitter profiles, and recent and relevant articles they have written.”

“Some experts and enthusiasts may be influential in a number of areas including Twitter, Quora and foursquare,” the spokesperson adds. “When an expert qualifies in more than one category, in most cases we will surface their results from Twitter and Quora in sidebar. As when we introduce any new feature, we’ll continue to look closely at the right way to surface experts related to the query, and may make adjustments as we learn more about the feature.”

“We’re just beginning to surface news experts and their author pages in sidebar, so while we won’t have author pages for everyone, we’re hard at work to grow our coverage,” the spokesperson says.

It’s interesting that Bing is including Google properties like Blogger, and even Google+ (which is connected to Google’s own authorship feature) in its “people who know” mix. It’s also interesting that Facebook wasn’t mentioned in that group, considering the Bing sidebar already makes a great deal of use of Facebook.

Either way, it will be intriguing to see how the feature (and the sidebar itself, for that matter) evolves.

“When people share words, thoughts and photos on their blogs, they’re sharing their passions with the world,” said product manager Ali Pasha at the time. “Here at Google Affiliate Network, we see that many of our publishers use Blogger, and often times they’re passionate about brands or products that they believe in.”

Bloggers can go to the “Earnings” tab in Blogger and sign up for AdSense, and access the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger gadget when they write a new post. From that point, just select a relevant affiliate ad from the “Advertise Products” gadget, and publish your post. When someone clicks on the ad, you can earn a commission.

Bestbathrooms.com, Cheapsuites.co.uk, Crooked Tongues, Diamond Manufacturers, eFlorist, Hudsonreed.com, Perfume Click and The Snugg are among the advertisers participating.

Google announced that the Blogger platform now has a Google+ tab built into the dashboard. It’s all about growing your Blogger audience through the growing Google+ community. The two go hand-in-hand with some new features to make sharing your content with those in your circles easier than ever.

First up is the initial integration. Just like when YouTube first got Google+ integration, you’re going to have to link your blog with your Google+ profile. It’s easy enough – just go to the Google+ tab in your Blogger dashboard. The option to connect the two profiles should be readily apparent.

If you have a large Google+ following, you can notify those people when you publish a blog post on Blogger. It’s built right into the software so you don’t have to copy and paste links into Google+ anymore. It even has all the sharing options so you can refrain from sharing blog posts with people that you’ve shoved into the “Jerks” circle.

After you’ve shared your newest blog post about your cat with your followers, you can recommend to them that they share the same blog post. Followers can +1 and share your post straight from Google+.

To hook potential new fans, you can also add the Google+ gadget to your blog page. From the gadget, fans can add your profile to a circle and continue reading your content once they’ve left your blog.

If you’re the kind of the person that likes to root for the underdog by using Blogger and Google+ instead of WordPress and Facebook, you’ll be right at home with these new features. Considering that Google+ is still growing, Blogger might be able to ride on the coattails of success.