By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

"Hey now that Time says that bloggers are the person of the year maybe we at Google should have some whizzy blog software. Hey! What's this with mold and hair all over it?! It says "Blogger." Maybe we can gussy this old thing up."

Yes, after about, what, six or seven years, Google is rolling out a new version of the original blog software, which they've left starving in a forgotten closet for most of these many Web 2.0 years.

InfoWorld reports that the new version will feature user-definable templates, tagging of posts, multiple authors, and faster publication of new posts.

On the Blogger homepage, Google gushes over the new version:

The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.

We’re excited about the new version of Blogger, both for what it can do now (which also includes access control for blogs and better input fields for post dates) and what we’ll add to it in the future, now that we have a new, stable, powerful infrastructure to work with. We’re done with “beta,” but we’re far from done with the new Blogger.