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.

There are still some questions here, as there were in Twitter's case. As Google says, a takedown request will only affect the content at the TLD of the country whose government requests the takedown. Does that mean users in that country will still be able to access content at other domains? Obviously, Google can't be straightforward about that if the answer is "yes," so the fact that it doesn't explicitly say "no" sounds good.

In fact, it makes clear that users can specifically request a particular country's version of a Blogger site by using a "No Country Redirect" URL. If you request http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr," it will go to the .com (U.S.) version of the site no matter what. It sets a short-term cookie to prevent the browser from redirecting that blog to a local domain. Whether that version will be accessible within a blacked-out country is unclear, so let's test it!

Better Than Nothing (And Then Some)

The idea of Web companies complying with censorship requests sounds icky. But too many people gave knee-jerk objections to Twitter's policy last week without considering what it actually does. Both Twitter and Google (at least with Blogger) have found ways around censoring this content altogether while still complying with local laws. The content isn't lost. It's still accessible outside of that area. Blogger sites may still be accessible within some blackout areas if users request a different domain.

The alternative, in some countries, would be to block the entire service. There's no way that's good for free speech. One could argue that doing business at all in a country that supports censorship is wrong for a communication company. But then put yourself in the local users' shoes and consider which alternative is preferable. The shame here is on the governments who censor their people, not on the companies sneaking free speech past them however they can.

What do you think of Blogger and Twitter's new censorship policies? Sound off in the comments.

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.

"The charges included conspiring to commit acts of terror, rendering support to terrorism, participating in a terrorist organization (Ginbot 7) and money laundering. Elias is also found guilty of masterminding and providing financial support to the other defendants who remained under police custody since June 2011."

The other defendants, who were sentenced to 14 years in prison and given fines of 33,000 birrs ($1,500.00), were Reeyot Alemu, a columnist for the weekly newspaper Feteh, and Woubshet Taye, who was deputy editor of Awramba Times, which has since closed up shop.

Kifle's higher profile, resulting from his U.S. residency, may have saved him from the death penalty. That may not be the case for another blogger, Eskinder Nega, who was arrested in September, also on "terrorism" charges.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this is Kifle's second life sentence, following a 2007 decision, also rendered in absentia. The first conviction was on charges of treason and was part of a 2006 crackdown on the press. He was targeted for his publication's coverage of the Ethiopian government's violent clampdown on protests that arose after the 2005 elections in the country.

Photo via CPJ | tip via Scott Baldauf

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.

To change the blog to a full-text feed, go to Settings and select "Full."

To make comments embeddable, go to Settings > Posts and comments. Select the "Embedded" option.

Users who have already replaced their Blogger profiles with their Google+ profiles can share snippets of Blogger blog posts to their Google+ circles.

For bloggers who already have a good following on Google+, integrating the two makes a lot of sense. But for anyone who blogs on Blogger under a pseudonym, linking Google+ and Blogger closes the opportunity for that fake Internet profile. Threaded comments are available for users regardless of whether or not they integrate their Google+ and Blogger profiles.

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.

The +snippet to share a Blogger post is the same one that launched across the Web in October. Ben Parr reported in July that the Blogger brand was going away to make room for Google+, but that hasn't panned out. Instead, Blogger launched new dynamic layouts and a new iOS app, showing a commitment to the product in the Google+ era.

The Blogger team is holding a live video Hangout on the Blogger +page at 3 p.m. Pacific today to discuss the new features.

Which blogging service do you use?

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.

From the Blogger Buzz blog, here are descriptions and examples of the seven new themes:

• Classic (Gmail): A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
• Flipcard (M loves M) - Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
• Magazine (Advanced Style) - A clean, elegant editorial style layout
• Mosaic (Crosby's Kitchen) - A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar (Blogger Buzz Blog) - An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot (Canelle et Vanille) - An interactive pinboard of your posts
• Timeslide (The Bleary-Eyed Father) - A horizontal view of your posts by time period

You can input the URL of any Blogger blog to preview it in Dynamic Views here.

Blogging Gets Complicated

Blogger is bringing the heat with this update. It builds on last month's overhaul of the blogging control panel and analytics dashboard, and its first native iPhone app launched earlier this month. I guess that rebranding effort we heard about in July isn't happening. Right now, the Blogger brand looks about as strong as ever. The move puts Blogger squarely in the camp of the bigger, louder, more intense new wave of publishing tools. These designs are not quite the full-screen blowouts of new ventures like Jux, but they certainly stretch the constraints of the term "blog."

It's a smart move, since competitors are going the other way. Tumblr designs aren't exactly minimal, but the tool is best suited for small posts that get re-shared into all kinds of different venues and layouts, and it pretty much owns that market. Posterous has tried to turn even sharper, rearranging its app around mobile posting and sharing, edging more into the territory of social media tools. And no one can forget WordPress, which is doing just fine, thank you very much, but its ecosystem rests on themes developed by third parties, and these new dynamic Blogger themes are a step or three above, technologically.

What do you think of the new Dynamic Views in Blogger? Tell us in the comments.

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.

Which free blogging platform do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments.

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?

Parr's reports, if accurate (Google has not responded to my request for a comment), are hardly surprising. The massive push around Google Plus seems to bring all the company's social elements under one site: mobile and video messaging (Huddle and Hangouts), relationship management (Circles), and photo-sharing (Picasa, soon to be Google Photos).

Bye Bye Blogger? Or Better Blog Integration?

Renaming Picasa clarifies the product's purpose; renaming Blogger, less so. Indeed, the report from Mashable seems to have set off quite a stir of nostalgia (in my Google Plus stream at least), as many of us have fond memories of the blogging platform from the earliest days of blogging's existence - whether we still use Google's blogging platform or not. Although many of us have moved on to other blogging tools - Tumblr or WordPress, for example - Blogger does remain one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web. For its part Google has been in the process of refreshing and updating the look to Blogger this year. However, removal of the Blogger brand would be a much bigger change than simply new templates.

Hopefully that change would also include integrating Blogger more fully into the Google Plus site, linking Blogger profiles with Google profiles and giving blog updates a prominent position. But that integration isn't something folks would like to see just with Blogger. Many early users of Google Plus are calling for the platform's integration with Google Docs and of course Google Apps accounts as well.

Rebranding Google

Those products, however, already fall into the Google naming convention. The other outlier, of course, when it comes to branding is YouTube. Parr says that Google has no plans to rebrand YouTube to Google Video (a good thing considering the fate of the actual Google Video earlier this year).

Bringing all the products into alignment with the same sort naming convention does help solidify the Google brand - search "plus" all these social, communication, and collaboration components. Whether or not this adds more fuel to the fire about supposed antitrust violations remains to be seen.

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.

Postrank measures engagement by comments to posts, mentions on Twitter, inbound links, votes on Digg and many other quantifiable metrics. All the numbers below are over the last 90 days. Blogspot, the domain for Google's Blogger blogging tool, still reigns supreme almost 11 years after it launched.

What's the takeaway here? I look at these numbers and think a couple of things. First, it appears that the world-changing democratization of publishing by the first wave of blogging tools has had some sticking power. Second, just because our early adopters' scene and the mainstream media are talking about Facebook and Twitter instead of "the bloggers" nowadays, doesn't mean that people have abandoned blogging. Finally, even though curation services like Tumblr and Posterous are pretty awesome, they haven't gotten as much mainstream mindshare yet as the old classics have.

I think these engagement numbers are a good snapshot of the state of the technology over time. I find it encouraging that there is such a thriving blogging scene still today.

What do you take away from these numbers?

Postrank is generally very useful and accurate, but the maze of social media links can sometimes be challenging to penetrate. Running Facebook.com and Twitter.com through the API turns up an unrealistically low amount of engagement with those domains. Both are reported to be roughly 3 times as big as ReadWriteWeb. I suspect the ratio is a little bigger than that.

Other Interesting Observations

What other domains are being talked about across social media conversations? Postrank made some interesting observations today, including:

Twitter users talk about Google, Facebook users talk about Yahoo

Honda gets talked about far more than Ford or Toyota.

Features

Every template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with iStockphoto to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won't allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images.

In the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs' footers.

Change your Color Palette With One Slider

One of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability.

As Siobhan Quinn, Google's product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google's users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn't enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites - while possible - was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code by hand, which a lot of Blogger's users weren't quite ready to do.

Other blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and TypePad and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On Wordpress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve.

According to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day.

As one way to rally netizens to participate in life-changing social action, Rania called upon today's attendees to join in her mission of universal education for children. In participation with the 1Goal project, the Queen appealed to bloggers for their help. As part of her campaign to collect more than 300 million signatures in support of universal childhood education, she is asking bloggers to devote one day of tweeting and blogging to the 1Goal project.

Said Rania, "The classroom can be a chrysalis for change... We can be lifestreaming and life changing."

For more information on how you can participate visit join1goal.org.

Photo Credit: Chris Heuer

Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the bottom of this post for the code).

Features, Including New Facebook Support

Brizzly is a self-described "social media reader." It's a browser-based service, like Blogger.com. Today Brizzly added Facebook as the second service it supports, after Twitter. Facebook users will be able to view and update their status, wall posts, comments and likes using Brizzly.

Brizzly is similar to Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr (not all of them currently support Facebook though). However power users won't see much reason to switch, as Brizzly doesn't have the advanced features of those products. And that's the point.

The feature set of Brizzly aims to make microblogging a simple and seamless experience for users. For example instead of having to click links to view media such as photos and videos, Brizzly puts those items inline in the user's stream. Another example: Direct Messaging via Twitter has a UI (user interface) very similar to Instant Messaging, which many mainstream users will be familiar with.

Brizzly in 2009 = Blogger in 2003

Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience. This seems like a great strategy. Back in 2003, blogging was at a similar stage in its adoption as microblogging is today - passionately used by early Internet adopters, but not fully understood by a wider audience.

The popular Twitter clients circa 2009 include TweetDeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Those are great apps and no self-respecting Web geek would be caught without at least one of them. However it's unlikely that your brother or sister, let alone Mom or Pop, is using those products. Brizzly wants to be the service that introduces your family and friends to the world of microblogging and social media.

Jason Shellen, who RWW readers may also recognize as a creator of Google Reader, was at The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in October. Jolie O'Dell interviewed him about about filtration and discovery on the real-time web. Shellen mentioned that mainstream users probably won't use hashtags to tag their tweets. He noted (at about the 3 minute mark in the video) that "most people are not going to do that [hashtags], so it needs to evolve into a different type of filtration." One of Brizzly's goals is to make hashtags and other "geeky" social media concepts simple for mainstream users to understand.

Less Noise

Regular people often struggle to see the value in Twitter and other social media apps. Web app developers need to find ways to convince people that behind the noise of social media, there is tremendous value.

So how does Brizzly compare to the now Facebook-owned FriendFeed, an aggregation service that early adopters love but most others think is information overload? I spoke to Jason Shellen at the RWW Summit about that. He told me that Brizzly won't blend services together like FriendFeed. It will keep them separate (Twitter, Facebook, other services that are added over time), in order to maintain simplicity.

Conclusion

All in all, we're impressed by the vision of Brizzly and we think it has a good chance of hitting the same wide user base that Blogger.com so successfully tapped. It's fair to say that power users will probably be a little disappointed by Brizzly - but you're not the target audience.

INVITE CODE: ReadWriteWeb readers can access the private beta of Brizzly by signing up using the code "rwwsentme" or clicking here. There are 2000 invites available.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that's what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for "blogs I'm following," and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft's fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It's what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It's what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

"Follow" is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that "follow" will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think "follow" is still too unclear? We think it's pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out "follow" language and links soon if the Google move is well received.