It’s shaping up to be a shiny, happy holiday for all the excited girls and boys of the blogospheriverse.

• the official release of version 2.0 of their blogging software. They were going to allow us to open our presents a little early, naughty devils, but more mature minds prevailed – partly to ensure that the WordPress support community isn’t handling anguished cries of “This takes batteries?!” on the 25th. (Don’t worry about what this means for Jews; the second night of Hanukkah is traditionally reserved for debugging and installs anyway.)
• Technorati just couldn’t wait, and rolled out a slew of enhancements three days ago. Here’s some of what they’ve dropped into your stocking: charts that track your search terms over time, more meaningful and better organized extracts in your search results, ways to limit your searching to a particular set of blogs, and more information in blog profiles (including tag clouds – welcome to the party, T’rati!).
• A gleaming new data centre for Bloglines, which should dramatically speed up their blog reader service and reduce the number of surprise outages.
• Presumably, something very nice from six apart to their Typepad customers, to make up for the massive outage they experienced on the weekend (not to mention the lack of communications around the incident). Last time there was a technical foul-up, they offered free blog hosting for up to 45 days. This time, I’m guessing you’ll get a pony.
• Performancing’s free blog editor for Firefox – a resizeable window pane that sits below your browser window, letting you surf around, copying and pasting, while you draft your post. I’m trying it right now for the first time, and it’s fantastic. I hope to have more to say in a while about it, but for now I’ll leave it at “wow”… and one more reason to switch to Firefox.