You might not have noticed as a reader of blogs on the Blogger service, which is owned by Google in case you didn't know. But if you write a blog on Blogger, and especially if your blog has maybe a couple hundred posts or less, you've no doubt been pestered by Blogger to move your blogs over to Blogger Beta, which brings the process further into the Google fold.

By "further," I mean that the blogs in the Beta are tied to a Google account, rather than the separate Blogger accounts that have been used until now. Not a big deal for me, because I already have a Google account for Gmail, Google Groups and Google Docs. Clearly they want eveyone who uses Blogger to also use more Google services (including AdSense, I'm sure) that add more directly to the parent company's bottom line.

And the Blogger Beta (which went out of that status yesterday, if I'm correct) does things a little differently. First of all, blogs don't "rebuild" after each post is published. The updating process is much quicker, since posts are part of each blog's database, and the blog page itself is built on the fly for each visitor who accesses it. As a reader, you don't notice the difference, except that the fonts all look a bit different.

Other Blogger Beta features include the ability to restrict the readers of a blog by e-mail address. I guess there is some kind of login process. Google seems to think that blogs are more -- or can be more -- than people like myself blathering about who knows what for who knows who. Instead, the blog format (which really, when it comes down to it, is a unique and useful way of presenting and organizing information), as Google envisions it, is something that can be applied to business, where the information in any given blog is not necessarily for public consumption.

I think they are on the right track, although the whole idea of public blogs (like this one) is not something that's going to go away or ebb in any significant way.

One thing for sure, the nature of the blog itself will change. Daily News online guru Josh Kleinbaum clued me in to a new Yahoo! service that, as he explained it, is a video-based blog-like thing (couldn't find it, but I'll inquire later). In other Yahoo! news, the company has a video service meant to compete with YouTube.

It also has Yahoo! Go, which feeds video, audio and still photos from both digital cameras and mobile phones to your home-entertainment devices, and featuring a virtual online DVR with no TiVo-like fees (with compatible TV tuner cards, of course). Go to the faq to read more.

Back to the Beta ...

Just to check compatibility with all my old programs and hardware, I started a new blog in the Beta, This Old Browser, which has many scintillating posts about ... old browsers, including the quest for the holy browsing grail, which is the elusive Netscape 4.8 ("Hey, I though it went from 4.7 to 7, you say," but you'd be wrong.) I didn't get the invite yesterday, as I have about six times in the past few weeks, but once it does come, I will move the rest of my Blogger blogs over to the Google-ish new system.