Wonders never ceases in the blogosphere - Microcrosoft comes out with a pretty good blog publishing tool, and now Google unveils a much-needed update to Blogger.com, which has been strangely ignored by the search engine giant in recent years. TechCrunch has all the nitty-gritty detail,s and you can check out the beta here. Before anyone gets carried away from the new and improved Blogger, you really have to ask yourself why Google has given it so little love since buying Pyra in 1999 - despite the fact the blogosphere has been exploding. I mean Froogle, Okrut and Google Blog Search got more attention than Blogger, which has been lacking many of the most basic features (e.g. trackbacks, for pete's sake) while rivals such as TypePad, Wordpress and Blogware have aggressively pushed forward. Blogger, however, has managed to stick around because it's an easy platform for newbies to get started. I haven't had a chance to check out the new Blogger but all I can say is "it's about time!".