Kevin Marks reports:

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages.

Kevin has more details on how to add this to your template if you're using new-style Blogger templates. Here's a note I sent to the Blogger mailing list when someone raised the "what good is it" question:

Just to clarify, hAtom was never intended to be a "syndication format"
nor to compete with Atom or RSS. It's simply designed to describe the
microcontent on webpages, such as blog posts. We used Atom because it
provides a well-defined nomenclature for describing such elements.

What can you do with it? You could provide search results that narrow
into the exact content on a page, rather that keywords that were found
elsewhere on a page. You can write tools, such as entry pretty
printers, or "reblogging" tools for quoting posts that work
universally across hAtom blogs, rather than depending on the author/
publisher to provider this for you. Because it effectively
standardizes CSS elements for blog posts, you can write CSS that works
across all hAtom conforming blogs. You can combine with other
microformats or "POSH" HTML to associate data displayed on a page
(say, the geographic location of where a post was made) with the exact
post it belongs to.

In and off themselves not earth shattering perhaps, but not bad for
standardizing a half-dozen or so tags with minimal effort for
publishers.

All templates in the BlogMatrix Platform are hAtom compliant.

In case you haven't noticed, BlogMatrix has a template system so if you don't like the "System" look and feel, you can easily install your own from the admin page. What's our template language? Simple: we use Blogger's "classic" templates. You can see the manual for these here. If you're migrating from a blogger account (or just have one) you can grab it from over there and install here.

Important: we don't work with new template language. If the file begins with '<?xml', it's no good to us (yet).

Hint: we're working on extending the Blogger template model to be more flexible for our needs. One good trick is this...

<Blogger n="50">

... which increases the number of entries shown from the default 20 to 50 (or whatever)

We'll probably be removing some functionality from the templates in the near future too. In particular, we're definitely removing "views" and we may be removing the ability to use the System 'frame' with your own template.

TechCrunch reports:

The new Blogger beta product, open to a limited number of users in August, is now live for all users.

The key changes include the addition of tags, which Google has always called “labels,” and an option to create a private blog. You can also now sign into your blogger account using your Google credentials, and Google has made editing the template and posts significantly more user friendly.

None of these changes put Blogger ahead of its primary competitors. For example, SixApart’s Comet product allows not only for private blogs, but privacy setting can also be changed for each post. but it is a sign of hope for Blogger users who’ve been stuck with last generation software for years.

Privacy per post is becoming a bigger and bigger deal. I believe the template format for Blogger has also changed? I'll have to go look at this: maybe they're planning to do integration with Google Page creator...

If you have an existing weblog on Blogger/Blogspot or MovableType/Typepad, you can now can easily import the entire blog. Just go the admin page and on the lower left you'll see "Import from Blogspot" and "Import from Blogger". Just click on the link and follow the instructions.