Feeling Featured

This one is a little news flash for all the bloggers and Google lovers out there. Officially announced on Blogger (http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/12/highlight-posts-that-matter-most.html), Google has another feature just for bloggers. It is apparently called “featured post” on Blogger, a blogging platform. Blogger was originally owned by the company Pyra Labs in 1999. Google bought Pyra Labs in 2003 and has been running Blogger ever since. Fun fact: the original creator of Blogger, Evan Williams, went on to create Medium, the blogging site you just happened to find now. “Featured post” allows bloggers to highlight their favorite post at the top of their page so that more viewers can find it. The post can be changed at any time by the blogger. While this is a new feature for Blogger, Paul Sawers writes in Venture Beat (found here http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/11/googles-blogger-platform-introduces-featured-post-tool-to-help-you-showcase-your-favorite-content/) that other social media sites such as Twitter already have similar features. I think having a featured post is an interesting idea, so that popular posts are easy to find. Unfortunately, only one post can be featured at a time. If your blog is very popular, you cannot highlight very much of it. It also doesn’t feature the post on any outside sites, so it can still be hard to draw in any new traffic. This could be considered a small gimmick by social media sites to feel “new”.