Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has updated blog service Blogger.com. It has been a few years since Google changed around the look and feel with Blogger. Blogger’s entire editing and management experience has been re-written from scratch so that it is faster and more efficient.

Today is a big day for Klout. The social influence calculator just added five new networks to its algorithms, bringing their measurement possibilities to 10 total networks. Adding Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr, Last.fm and Instagram to the already-included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and YouTube means that some Klout users are about to see a huge jump in their scores. The staff blog reminds users that “connecting an account will never lower your Score, but it may increase it as we can give you credit for your influence in that network.” TechCrunch notes that Google+ is still missing from the list but that it should be on its way soon.

Mashable reports that they have exclusive information from Google: Picasa and Blogger will be renamed Google Photos and Google Blogs. Google is making definite efforts to unify their brand identity, and the independently named products are getting a makeover that will integrate both platforms with Google+. Google has previously renamed other acquired services, rebranding JotSpot into Google Sites and GrandCentral into Google Voice.

Blogger.com, a blog publishing service owned by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), was hit with a major outage throughout the day today. Most of the blog posts hosted on Blogger were changed to read-only mode. The Blogger product team had rolled back a scheduled maintenance release from last night and their engineers are hard at work to restore Blogger. The Blogger team redesigned the publishing platform, but this outage is not related to the changes. [AllThingsD]

Over half a billion blog posts with over half a trillion words have been written on Blogger.com thus far according to Google product manager Chang Kim. These blog posts have been read by about 400 million people. About 75% of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside of the U.S. as the blog platform is available in 50 different languages. Google is going to finally redesign Blogger using the Google Web Toolkit. The company is going to present the new Blogger design at SXSW. Below is a video demo of the new features:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is now firing about 2 people per month for leaking information to the media. It is known as the “NYT effect” in reference to a New York Times article that criticizes how bloated and bureaucratic Google has become. Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, has complained publicly about how Google handled the acquisition of Blogger before Google had their IPO. Blogger was a company that Williams founded and he was told that he would have a lot of power to hire people for the Blogger team. Hiring people on the Blogger team became a nightmare for him when Google had their IPO. [TechCrunch]

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has added real-time stats to Blogger, the blog platform service owned by Google. The new service, called Blogger Stats is available to non-private Blogger accounts.

Jaycee Lee Dugard was a kidnapping and rape victim of Phillip Garrido.  Dugard was kidnapped from her home in South Lake Tahoe about 18 years ago when she was age 11.  Garrido, the kidnapper will face 29 felony charges which include rape and kidnapping.  His wife will also be charged.  Dugard was kept in a tent and in sheds along in the couple’s backyard along with the two daughters she had with Garrido.  This is one of the most chilling news articles to have surfaced within the last week.

Garrido has a personal blog on Blogger that is now flooded with hate comments.  After the jump is a screenshot of some of the hate comments he has received.  But another chilling discovery that was found on the Internet regarding Garrido is a mystery van following a Google Street View vehicle.  The van was suspected to belong to Garrido himself.  Pictures of the van following the Street View car are posted on BoingBoing.  Above is one of the pictures of the van.

Perhaps the reason why the van followed the Google Street View car was because it had cameras all over it.  Anyone snooping around anywhere with cameras are usually uninvited.