As you asked for findings in your post: check the blogger Buzz post buzz.blogger.com/2005/09/blog- ...

Here do they announce that 2 bugs are being fixed (robots.txt & redirects)

If you want to have your blog included in Google's blog index before they release their "Add Blog" page, do as I did: go to the personnalized Google homepage and in the news section subscribe to your own feed.

It worked great for me!

didier