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| "Good news"? Or another death-knell? |
My friend
Mary Scriver is struggling with
the changes Google Blogger hath wrought. We've had some back-and-forth on the matter. Google is making some terrible errors, I think. This is my latest email to her, commiserating with her plight.
Hi Mary -
This is one of those times when I wish I could mask-up, hop in the car and come over. There are tweaks to "New Blogger" that might work for you, but they do take some searching for.
In the main, however, I am also deeply unhappy with the direction Google is taking with this new template. Google engineer Avery Pennarun nails it on the head with this comment: "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly everything."
In this case the engineers reworking Google's Blogspot have convinced themselves, not unreasonably, that easier accessibility via "smart" phone is a necessity for the great majority of internet users and thus a necessity for Blogspot bloggers as well. This is not unintelligent thinking. But it does not do a rigorous enough job of analyzing what Google Blogspot does best RIGHT NOW, and thus what they need to retain and reinforce to remain a viable platform in a roiling market of internet users.
Blogger/Blogspot is, as most blogging platforms, a predominantly word-based platform. People compose and post more text to Blogspot than they do anything else. Thus it does not compete directly with Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or really any of the other social media. Pictures and videos and soundfiles can all be posted on Blogspot, but mostly the people using Blogger are writers. Were I a member of Blogspot's think-tank I would highlight that and keep that the focus of Blogger. Other means of communication -- videos, pictures, soundfiles -- should be encouraged, particularly via properties that Google has acquired. Hey, make it a priority to provide ease of access to YouTube, YouTube Music, Google Photo, etc. Data-mining these media interdependencies ought to yield rich results. But always always always assure that composing and posting words is the highest priority -- because that is the current user's highest priority, and it won't change with a radically reimagined user template.
Returning to the field of phone use, I'd say ease of phone display is a must. Ease of composing and posting via phone, not so much. Most phone users have accounts with YouTube and Google Photo etc. Make sure the cross-platform use here is super-easy. But keep the focus of word composition where it is properly done -- on the home or office computer/laptop. "Legacy Blogger" very much outperforms "New Blogger" on that front.
Anyway, I have "Left Feedback" with Google and received nary an AI-generated peep of acknowledgment. I notice the hard deadline for those of us who prefer Legacy Blogger keeps getting kicked down the road. Initially it was July, no? Now it is the end of September (correction: September 1). Hopefully this signifies some reconsideration occurring among the fine engineers in charge of Google Blogger.
Best, WP/dpr
4 comments:
I got automatically switched last week, and found it hard to navigate. I couldn't search old posts, the quick edit button wasn't working, and not all of my labels were showing up.
So I switched back to legacy. I still have a couple weeks left before they force me to switch. (Does this differ by region, perhaps?) And I'll take those 2 weeks.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the bugs are just the inevitable birthing pains, and that they'll iron everything eventually.
I've been using Blogspot/Blogger for 16 years, you've been 17. It's possible some of these engineers were still in diapers when we put up our first posts. In general internet platforms do not reward long-term investment -- and internet users, particularly younger ones, are early adapters that beagle off to the next shiny thing on the horizon. If an engineer is in the younger cohort I imagine it would be very difficult to wrap their head around why someone would stick with a single platform for decades.
It's interesting going back to my old posts from 2003 or 2004. NONE of my links work. The blog has outsurvived just about every single external website I linked to back then. A reminder of how temporary the Internet is.
We'll see, I guess, what the future of blogger/blogspot is. Every so often, I get the urge to try to read up on whether or not Google is planning on keeping it around, or if its going the way of Google Plus. What I've read has lead me to believe that it's still getting enough use that they're willing to keep investing in it.
But as for this latest upgrade--everytime Facebook, or Youtube or anybody upgrades their platform, it's always a disaster initially. And then we all get used to the new interface, and they gradually iron out all the bugs. I'm thinking this is going to be the same. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
But for the moment, sticking with the old interface until they force me to change
Man, "404s" are so common on the links I posted 16 years ago that I'm amazed at just how many links are still valid, or rerouted somewhere valid. There weren't too many people figuring the internet was a great place to archive stuff for ever and always, other than the first round of Silicon Valley gazillionaires.
And yes, Google Plus looms large for me also. I liked that platform, actually, and was bummed when they binned it for entirely understandable reasons. But I gather Blogspot/Blogger is still a go-to site for (wait for it) new bloggers, as well as recalcitrant old-timers like ourselves. And its level of security is unparalleled. My experience blogging on a privately hosted site for a string of years was an incredible eye-opener. The back-end attacks increased exponentially with every passing year, to say nothing of the bot-hits in my comments. Wow, was I relieved to abandon that project (even as I remain grateful to this day for my friend's stellar job of hosting it)!
Re: New Blogger I'm not overly-cheesed with being forced to adapt. Sixteen years -- this is hardly the first renovation they've made. Some of the platform rejigging is indeed an improvement for users. And most of what concerns users like you, me and Mary is actually addressable in the new platform -- but detective work is definitely required. And I think my central critique is still salient -- ease of text composition and posting is the paramount concern, far above phone pandering.
Actually, now that I think of it, I'm wondering if security concerns aren't the bigger impediment in this phone-phriendly Blogger?
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