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Google engineers suffered the wrath of bloggers last week when "a significant number of unplanned outages" of the search company's Blogger blogging platform. Google decided to try the transparency in PR blogging concept at the Blogger Buzz blog (that's a lot of blogging for one intro, isn't it?) by apologizing and announcing a new beta version of Blogger.

Writes Pete Hopkins:

It's been a Murphyesque cavalcade of power failures, fileserver trouble, and wonky network hardware, and I hope you'll believe me when I say that the Blogger staff is even more sick of it than you are.

First up, our apologies. We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week's performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you.

So what are they doing about it? Pete says they fixed the old Blogger and are releasing a new and improved Blogger, which is now out in Beta.

In the long term, we're developing a new version of Blogger with some great new features that is built on technology and hardware that has proven, Google-quality reliability. The current Blogger infrastructure is - albeit in a very Lincoln's axe way - the same that Google acquired four years ago. Sure, we've built on it and expanded it significantly since then, but the truth is we've more than out-grown it. The new version is ground-up more scalable and less error-prone.

The news gets better: We foresaw the need for the long-term solution, well, a long time ago. Long enough ago that it's almost done, and you can use it as the new version of Blogger in beta. If you can switch to it (see requirements) you really should. The new version of Blogger is better in almost* every way, including reliability. (It's worth pointing out that none of this past week's trouble affected the new version of Blogger or its blogs.)

This illustrates two really great things about the way Google uses blogs to connect. They are transparent, self-effacing, and proactive with problems. That's a great way to build customer trust. Everyone understands that problems arise. Companies acting as if there never was a problem is going the way of the record player.

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