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Google's Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user's IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the "flexibility" to comply with removal requests according to local laws.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

The Federal High Court in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sentenced expatriate journalist and blogger Elias Kifle to life in prison yesterday. Kifle is the editor of the Washington D.C.-based blog, Ethiopian Review. He was sentenced in absentia and remains in the United States.

It was originally reported that he could receive the death penalty, which is the maximum penalty for his alleged crime of "political terrorism" in the northeast African country.

Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.

Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.

There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.

Blogger has announced "the first of many Google+ features" today, launching an automatic +snippet sharing box after you publish a blog post. It only saves a few clicks, but this makes it as easy as humanly possible to share Blogger posts to your Google+ circles.

In order to turn on this sharing option, Blogger users must link their Blogger and Google+ profiles. Blogger users got the option to replace their user profiles with their G+ profiles in October. Users can disable this feature in their sharing settings, and they can always share individual posts using the 'share' link in the post list.

Google just launched dynamic views for Blogger, its free blogging platform, and they are something else. Powered by AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, these new themes for Blogger users are heavy-duty, interactive designs, not mere blog templates. The announcement claims that they also load "40 percent faster than traditional templates," but that will require some testing. Just in trying to load Google's blog posts announcing this update, this author saw lots of new Blogger loading graphics with spinning gears.

Nevertheless, these designs look amazing. They have infinite scrolling, dynamic loading of graphics and new posts, easy re-sorting, keyboard shortcuts for navigation and, of course, one-click sharing to Google Plus "and other social sites." There are seven new templates, and they can be gently customized. More customization options will be added "in the coming weeks." The flagship Google blogs for Gmail, LatLong and Docs are getting dynamic makeovers, too.

Google has just announced a new iPhone app for Blogger, its pioneering free blog platform. Though quite orange, the interface is clean and native-looking, and it allows publishing, drafting and editing of blog posts while on the go.

The app doesn't offer a full-fledged blog post editor, but instead it offers simple photo uploading, tagging and location services, concentrating on features that complement mobile blogging. Its features are comparable to the Android app, which went live in February. The previous iPhone client for Blogger was built by a third party.

It looks as though the efforts to bring together Google's services under the "Plus" umbrella might involve rebranding two of Google's longstanding products: Blogger and Picasa. Mashable's Ben Parr reports that the Blogger and Picasa names - not the products - will go away, as early as the end of the month. That timing will coincide with, according to Parr, the opening of Google Plus to the public.

As Parr points out, this won't be the first time that Google has rebranded products, particularly following acquisitions. The VOIP company GrandCentral, for example, became Google Voice after Google acquired it. Both Picasa and Blogger are acquisitions, although it's been almost a decade since they were bought by Google.

So why rebrand these two products now?

This week, game network WildTanget announced it will soon be testing out a subscription game rental service on T-Mobile's Android phones and tablets. Instead purchasing a game to keep, users will be offered the opportunity to rent a game for the day, for as little as 25 cents. If they end up liking the game and decide to buy, they'll be able to apply the rental fee towards the full purchase price of the mobile application.

Will this encourage Android's notoriously penny-pinching users to open up their wallets? Or is a mistake to think that pricing alone is what's keeping Android users from buying apps in large numbers? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Many of the top investors in the tech industry are also prolific bloggers, offering their insights on investment and technology trends. So if you're looking for a list of the best - or at least the most trafficked, then you're in luck. As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a story about what the best-of-the-blogging venture capitalists love, VC Larry Cheng has posted his 4th annual Venture Capitalist Blog Index.

The index ranks the top blogs written by venture capitalists, using data from Compete and the blogs' average monthly uniques from the fourth quarter of 2010.

AltHouse, Citizen WElls, Economist's View: These are some of the most popular blogs in the world and their streams of daily posts get hundreds of legitimate comments. They are published on Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad, respectively. A report published today by data analysis service Postrank concludes that legacy-hosted blog platforms are still far ahead of much-hyped microblogging services like Tumblr and Posterous in terms of reader engagement. This despite the fact that you don't hear about people using Blogger and Typepad much anymore in early-adopter circles.

Read on for graphs of engagement below. The same analysis performed here can be run on any sets of top-level domains using the newly released Postrank Domain Activity API.