On the weekend I tweaked the blog a bit and I decided to replace the useless archives widgit with the sexy new tag cloud. No-one ever used the archive links so I think it is a more helpful tool to let people find things on the blog they want. Having done that I thought I would go over to Blogger and do exactly the same with some of my older blogs.

Nothing going. Blogger has introduced blog tags (after WordPress categories but before WordPress tags) but looking through the widgits I cannot add a pre-made simple tag cloud.

It is a story of stagnation and one that makes Blogger more and more irrelevant for me. It was the first blogging site I signed up with and I love loads of other Google applications. The people who make things like GMail and Calendar should be pointing out to the guys at Blogger how quickly they are falling behind in both function and utility.

WordPress has a vast amount of information on who is visiting your blog and why, what pages and posts are popular and what people are searching for when they visit the site. Google Analytics could do exactly the same job but you have to do the hard work yourself. You have to put the Javascript into Blogger and check the stats in Analytics. Now naturally there are privacy issues in joining up these services but if I want to view an integrated set of data on my blog (as I can in the market leading software) surely it should be made easy for me to do.