Why has Blogger lost its search function?

 Blogger now won't let me enter anything in the search box.

Are the people at Google out to kill Blogger and blogging?

Why this reduced functionality?

They made the "Blog This" function post garbage. See, for example, my Simple Links blog, which I used as a straight blog, that is, a web log of sites visited that I might want to refer to again. The "Blog This" feature worked well for that purposes, as well as for quoting extracts from other sites to quote in blog posts. Then Google decided to "improve" it, which made it useless for any purpose at all -- have a look at Simple Links to see how "improved" it is.

They made the editor a lot more difficult to use too. So much so that I went back to LiveJournal, until they decided to go one better than Blogger by making their editor not only more difficult but impossible to use.

All the blogging platforms seem to be in an intense rivalry to produce the worst UX (user experience) ever.

On publishing half-baked ideas

One of the purposes of this blog, stated in the header ever since it started, is the publication of half-baked ideas. Perhaps something more needs to be said about that. The thought comes from an article that I read more than 50 years ago in a publication called Theoria to Theory, which advocated the publication of half-baked ideas. 

It noted that "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any of the philosophies currently in use. Nil illegitime carborundum, which is hot dog
Latin for 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'".

In the article Irving John Good lists the kinds of people who might be against the publication of speculations: 

1. People who are more concerned with development than research. This is a perfectly legitimate professional bias if it is not applied all the time; 
2. Perfectionists. A perfectionist is a person who does not like to be slapdash on ANY occasion. This is the sort of person who says that if a thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing well; 
3. People who think it is fatal to make a mistake, especially in print. Many senior civil servants;
4. People without a sense of humour; 
5. People who have been unlucky enough to suffer personally through too much credit being given to someone else's half-baked idea, which they themselves had baked.

And those likely to be in favour... 

1. People who recognise the importance of vague thinking, including those who are incapable of exact thinking; 
2. Zen Buddhists; 
3. People who have more ideas than they have time to exploit, possibly because they are getting old, or cluttered up with administrative responsibilities;
4. Cranks and geniuses (is a genius a crank who turns out to be right?); 
5. People who think that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth half doing;
6. People who see that their reading would give a better return for a given expenditure of time if the literature emphasised ideas more than technical details.

But it seems to me that we had to wait another 30 years from the publication of the article for the ideal medium for the publication of half-baked ideas to appear -- the blog.

So there is generally a difference between a blog post and a scholarly article that appears in an academic journal. Peer-reviewed academic journals don't usually favour the publication of half-baked ideas and those articles that contain half-baked ideas are rarely recommended for publication. I recently had to decline an invitation to write an article for a scholarly journal because to do it justice I would have had to do a great deal of research, including, probably, travelling to various parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But I no longer have access to an academic library (owing to bureaucratic bungles over renewal of books at the Unisa library) and can't afford to travel to all the necessary places, even if we weren't living in a time of Covid. 

But I think the publication of half-baked ideas in media such as blogs can stimulate discussion, and perhaps stimulate other people to bake them.  The discussion can begin in blog comments, and the debate can continue in other media, like mailing lists and other forums, online or offline. 

15 Years Old

Notes from Underground blog is 15 years old today. 

When it started, this platform was easy to use, and provided a quick and easy way to link to web sites with interesting ideas and to comment on them.  It also had a useful search facility, so that one could find blog posts on interesting topics by searching on tags. As my academic field was missiology, I searched on that, and found that quite a lot of bloggers who wrote about missiology also wrote about "emerging church". I followed that up, and found quite an interesting phenomenon, which seems to have died out now, but was quite strong 15 years ago. You can see some of my blog posts on  the emerging church here.

However the host of these blogs at Blogspot decided to make improvements -- they never could learn the truth of the slogan "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". They made everything harder to use, and broke the beautiful tool for searching for blog posts on a topic, replacing it with the clunky Google+ (which they subsequently abandoned) and eventually it became so hard to use that I moved this blog to Wordpress, a different blogging platform that was then easier to use. So most of the posts between 2010 and 2020 will be found there. 

But then the people at Wordpress, also neglecting the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage, messed up their user interface, making it more difficult to use than the Blogspot one, so, I moved this blog back here. You can still see my blog posts on the WordPress site, only there haven't been any new ones since February 2020, because all I can see when I try to post a new one is "A Script on this Page is Busy".

The current favourite posts, which people have been reading recently are these:

• The gills of the dolphin and Hemingway's reputation
• The Moaning Meme and the Freelance Cynic
• Children's science fiction and more
• Elidor: children's fantasy
• Psychedelic Christian Worship
• Anthropology - individualism, collectivism or communitarianism
• Zemblanity and education
• Rulers and authorities, territorial spirits, spiritual warfare
• Tolerance
• The One Ring

Blogging is not as popular as it used to be. 

The best years for blogging were probably 2007-2012, when the Web was really a web that connected people. There were sites like Tumblr, which aggregated blogs, so you could give people one Tuimblr address and they could see a kind of index of all your blog posts  on various platforms. But Tumblr lost most of its functionality years ago. There was Posterous, where you could post on the fly and on the move to various blogs and blog platforms, but that disappeared as well. There were tools to help you find blog posts, like Technorati, MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, but these were gradually taken over by big conglomerates like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon, who didn't like the connectivity of the web, and preferred to break the strands and keep you in silos instead. So blogs tend to become isolated -- one blogger, one silo. GoodReads is breaking its link with Twitter, so the web is becoming less of a web as one strand after another is broken. 

But I still keep blogging, and as I say at the top of the page:

The main aim of this blog is to interpret the Christian Order in the light of current affairs, philosophy, literature and the arts -- and vice versa. So it's about ideas. Social, political and religious comment. Links, notes on people, places, events, books, movies etc. And mainly a place where I can post half-baked ideas in the hope that other people, or the passing of time, will help me to bake them.

And for those who would like to say more about such things, and more interactively than is possible in blog comments, please consider joining the Christianity and Society forum. 

The end of the road for Facebook?

It  looks as though it may be the end of the road for Facebook and Twitter, at least for me and some of my friends. And possibly for other social media as well, including this blog. So I'm posting this just in case my friends, if any, would like to keep in touch if the various social media we've used for the last 20 years or so become inoperative.

 If you would like to keep in touch, try one of these

For close friends, people I've met personally who would like to keep in touch, pass on news and so on, there is the Social Proximity forum, where we can retain social proximity even if we have to keep physical distance because of geography or diseases like Covid. See here: Social Proximity.

For acquaintances, including online acquaintances, who would like occasionally to chat about anything and everything, there is the Off Topic forum, where nothing (well, almost nothing) is off topic. See here: Off Topic.

And for those who prefer more focused discussions on particular topics, there are these:

• Christianity & Society -- Christianity in relation to current affairs, politics, social justice, arts, literature, culture, war & peace, including mission, evangelism and missiology
• Inklings -- Christianity and literature, especially in relation to the Oxford Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams Tolkien et al, and similar authors. Share what you are reading or writing and what you think of it. 
• Orthodox Mission & Missiology -- Mission, evangelism and mission history of the Orthodox Church any time over the last 20 centuries.

See here for more contact info if we lose touch via Facebook, or this blog.

What is happening to Facebook?

The people at Facebook decided to give ity a "new look, which for many people turned out to be a bad User Experience (UX).

When Facebook started, they were a big success because of their simple, clean and fast user interface, which was so much better than other clunky social media sites like MySpace and SixDegrees.

Their new user interface seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the old MySpace one, which Facebook displaced.

As a result several of my friends have already left Facebook, or threatened to, and a lot of other people will be using Facebook a lot less than they used to, including my. This morning I wanted to take a quick look at Facebook to see if any friends had any messages for me, and to look at a couple of interesting articles that frioents had shared, and I had shared too to be able to find them again, when I didn't have time to read them than. But Facebook would not let me. First I had to "Get Started" on their new interface, and they would not let me do anything else until I had done that.

I really didn't have time for that crap, so I closed Facebook and went to Twitter. It showed notifications of "Recent Tweets" -- in other words, nothing to see here, move along, nobody has interacted with anything you tweeted. So move along I did.

And now the people who run this blogging platform have threatened. like Facebook, to replace the current usable user interface with a slow, awkward dysfunctional one, so any time I post anything here, I'm aware that this blog post may be my last.

The people who write the software for these things seem to think they can improve things by adding bells and whistles and taking away pistons and cylinders. They go for eye-candy and glitzy layout, relying on the speed of modern hardware to cover for their lack of programming skills.

The trouble is that those of us who can't afford to buy the latest and greatest hardware have to put up with software that slows to a crawl. and "minimalist" icons that are so mall and faint on the screen that you need a magnifying glass to see them. So eventually we just give up.

So I'm reminded in many ways of the old Queen song, and that is my message to any of my friends or former friends who may be reading this:

Do you hear my call, though you're many years away?
Do you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
for the day I take your hand
in the land that our grandchildren knew. 

Revising my blogroll

One problem with reviving an old blog is that the blogroll gets out of date. There are blogs on it that have been deleted, or some that haven't been posted on for 6, 7 or 8 years or more.

One great advantage of the Blogger Blogroll over the WordPress one, however, is that it lets you display the blogs in the order of most recent posts, so you don't go there, only to find that it's just stuff you've read already.

It's also possible to do some weeding out. Some people (like me!) have several blogs, and you find you have a link to one that is no longer being updated, so I've removed some of those and replaced them with the more active ones.

Having a blog on my blogroll doesn't mean that I endorse all the content, or any of it. I find it useful to read all kinds of things, even if I disagree with them. I find this a useful counter to the tendency of social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, to reinforce confirmation bias. Twitter used to be better, when it showed you stuff posted by people you follow in chronological order. Now, however, it tends to give priority to people who have lots of followers who are liked by the people who like the things you like.Facebook has always done that, Those sites make choices for you about what you will see, but a blogroll lets me choose what I will see.

So I like to read blogs that express different views on various topics, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. But do have a look at them -- chances are that if you find stuff you read on my blog interesting you might find some of them interesting too. Of course if you find my blog boring, you'll probably find those boring too, but you won't know till you've had a look.

Blogiversary of Khanya blog

Today is the blogiversary of my Khanya blog, which I started 13 years ago today.

Unfortunately I can't post this, or anything else, there any more, since the WordPress user interface is broken. It has been broken for about a week now, so I've reverted to blogging here,

Probably the most significant posts in those 13 years have been the series of Tales from Dystopia | Khanya, which are some memories of the apartheid era in South Africa. As it recedes further into the past fewer and fewer people will remember what the apartheid period was like -- no one under 30 can have much memory of it, and those who experienced the whole period will soon no longer be with us. So I hope others will be moved to blog about it, or record their experience in some other way.

I've written about many other things on the Khanya blog in the last 13 years -- theology, literature, history and politics. Just today someone commented that they had enjoyed reading a book I had reviewed: Another man’s war | Khanya. Fortunately the comment function still works, at least for those who have previously commented on it. Unfortunately comments from people who have not previously commented are put on moderation (to prevent comment spam), and approving of comments is one of the things that no longer works in WordPress.

Nevertheless, I post these stories and ideas in the hope that people will respond to them, and we can have a conversation. There are tag and category "clouds" in the right-hand margin of Khanya blog to find topics you are interested in, and a search function where you can enter a few key words to see what comes up. If you can't comment on the blog posts you can email me at shayes@dunelm.org.uk

I hope the people at WordPress will soon fix their broken user interface, but until they do, I'll continue blogging here.

Reviving an old blog because WordPress is broken

It looks as though I may have to revive this old blog on Blogger.

I moved it to WordPress when the editor here at Blogger became increasingly clunky and difficult to use, but even a clunky editor is better than none at all.

I seem to have been locked out of my WordPress blogs Khanya, Notes from Underground (that last a replacement for this one) and Hayes and Greene Family History. Though I can still read them, I can't write to them, edit them, or approve new comments. Whenever I try to access them for those purposes, I get this message:

And after finding it broken for several days, with no apparent attempt being made to fix it, there is little alternative but to return to Blogger.

I'll still post links to the WordPress blogs from time to time if they answer questions that people ask and so on, but won't be able to post any new stuff there until WordPress fix their user interface, which they've showed no sign of doing so far.

This blog has moved

Just a reminder that this blog has moved to Notes from underground | يارب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ.

Blogger and WordPress seem to be in competition to make their blog editors as unusable as possible, but at the moment Blogger is more difficult to use, especially for posting graphics, so I'm now using the WordPress site for most posts.

Reminder: this blog has moved

Just a reminder that this blog has moved to here.

I only post stuff here when for some reason the Wordpress site is inaccessible.

I moved the blog to Wordpress when the Blogger editor was downgraded and made more difficult to use, though the people at Wordpress seem to be doing their best to make their editor more difficult to use too.

You can see the latest posts on all my blogs in the Blogroll sidebar on the right, and those in some of the blogs I like reading too.

Reviving this blog

When Blogger introduced a new user-hostile blog editor, I moved this blog to a WordPress site here: Notes from Underground.

But now WordPress has introduced an even more user-hostile editor (which they call "an improved user expeience"). But it is very difficult to compose blog posts on that experience, and the only thing I experience is frustration, so I'm moving it back here, at least until Wordpress provides a proper editor instead of an unpleasant experiece.

One of the worst things about the Blogger editor is the loss of functionality, especially in posting pictures. It used to be possible to position pictures left, right or centre, but now one has to fiddle with the HTML code to do it, but even that is better that trying to edit stuff on the new WordPress experience.

Blogger's new user-hostile interface and other atrocities

I din't think I would post again on this blog at this site, since I moved it to here.The main reason for moving was the new user-hostile user interface and reduced graphics functionality.

But now something else has cropped up. I still have a family history blog on Blogger, which I still use occasionally. And they invited me to link the blog to Google+. To do so, however, I would have to merge my Blogger profile with my Google+ one. And, like most of the other changes, there would be a corresponding loss of functionality.

You see, on the existing Blogger profile, there is a field for entering things you are interested in. On the Google+ profile there isn't.

Why is that important?

One of the things I am interested in is missiology. So if I go to my profile and click on any of my interests, say missiology, it will show me other bloggers who are interested in missiology. And in that case, I might also find their blogs interesting. It is a good way of finding blogs to follow.

But now they want me to abandon that took by substituting my Google+ profile for my blogger one. Thanks, but no thanks.

So if you want to read this blog in future, click here Notes from underground

And since moving it to there, I've disabled comments on this blog. That's because abandoned blogs are a spammers' paradise, and they think they can leave spam comments to their heart's content. 
 
But the main reason for changing was the new user-hostile interface.

A few months ago Blogger switched me to the new user-hostile interface, which I struggled with for a while, but then found a way of getting the old user-friendly one back.

Now they've gone and switched me again, and hidden or removed all the things that made Blogger easy to use.

Let's see if the new new one is better than the old new one.

No, it isn't. I didn't want Jolly John's ugly mug in the middle of the page, I wanted it on the left, with the text wrapping around it to the right. But it seems that that functionality has been lost.

Yes, it is possible to do it with a lot more time-consuming finicky editing of the HTML code, but why should that be necessary? Why did they take away the simple and easy-to-use interface that got me to sign up for Blogger in the first place, and replace it with a slow and clumsy one? 
.

Weird requests for blog guest posts

Over the last few weeks I've been inundated with weird requests from people offering to write guest posts on my blogs. The following is typical of these requests:

I'm getting in touch with you because I'm interested in writing an article
for your blog. I came across your blog post khanya.wordpress.com while
writing for a website on hospitality management - specifically the field's
trend towards sustainability design. During my research, I've found that
incorporating green aspects to hotels, restaurants, and other service
industries has not only contributed to a healthier planet but in some
cases increased revenues.

Please let me know if you'd be interested in an article about both the
design and/or business aspects of sustainable design. Thanks, and I look
forward to hearing from you soon.

To begin with I just deleted them, but then they started sending me reminders, and asking for my response.

So I replied to a couple of these reminders, and asked for a sample of their proposed guest posts, and there was no response to that at all.

Has any one else been getting these offers?

Why would people offer to write a guest post, then remind you of the offer, and then when you take them up on the offer and ask to see the guest post, just not respond?

Are these people who have so much time on their hands that they have nothing better to do than waste other people's time be generating needless correspondence?

Or are they just harvesting e-mail addresses for the purpose of spamming? If that's the case, it seems a lot of trouble to go to -- to insert the name of the blog and all.

Or is it some kind of hidden scam, like the messages I used to get a year or so ago inviting me to a conference in some US city and in Dakar, Senegal?

After getting several of those, I tried to find more about what it was about by sending enquiries asking for further information about these conferences, but none was forthcoming. I assume that the conferences were all bogus, but I wonder why someone would go to the bother of sending out invitations to bogus conferences. They don't seem to be looking for any kind of response, because they never respond to the responses.

Another similar thing seemed to come from one persistent guy who called himself or herself Laure Norman. He said he had important information for me. Eventually I asked what the important information was, and the reply was that the important information was that there was important information. In the end I set up my e-mail program to simply bounce back anything received from that source, and I now see that my ISP (whose addresses this "Laure Norman" impersonated) is now marking it as spam at the server, so it never reaches me.

What puzzles me about all this, though, is what's in it for the people who do it. They're not asking for money, so there is no obvious scam involved. Does it give them some kind of satisfaction to waste other people's time and bandwidth?

A guest post on my blog?

Today I have had three (apparently) different people sending me e-mails to follow-up on queries about whether I was interested having them write guest posts on my blog.

I vaguely remember having a spate of queries to that effect about a month ago, and deleting them as spam or a scam. But now there is a follow-up.

I find such requests bizzare.

It is dead easy to start your own blog.

You can do it in about 2 minutes right here on Blogger.

So what puzzles me is why these people (or this person) wants to write posts on my blog. Assuming they are three different people (but why do they all write on the same day?) that would mean three posts by other people on my blog. If they really want to do that, perhaps the three of them could all start their own blogs, and then write guest posts on each others blogs. It would probably really confuse the readers though.

A similar problem is the people who write long comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the posts they are commenting on. I don't mean spammers, I mean people who have a preach coming on. And with them, too, they could easily start their own blogs and air their views to their hearts' content.

But guest posts? I don't get it.

If someone writes something that I think is interesting, I'll link to it and blog about it-- that, after all, is what blogs are for. But why would they want to write it on my blog? I just don't get it.

But what makes me really suspicious is that they all three came on the same day. That seems to be the kind of stuff conspiracy theorists should be interested in.

Has anyone else been getting odd requests like this, in threes?

Old Blogger interface - a huge improvement

Recently my Blogger dashboard switched from the old interface to the new one, which I've been struggling with for the last few weeks.

Now someone has explained to me how you can get the old one back.

If you have had the new and degraded Blogger dashboard foisted on you, you can (at least for the time being) get the old one back.

There's a little cogwheel thingy up in the top righthand corner of the new and degraded Blogger dashboard.

Click on it and among the options that are revealed is the option to revert to the old and improved Blogger interface.

Hat-tip to a commenter on nourishing obscurity | Google/Blogger/WordPress’s kindergarten coders

Ah, bliss!

If the new interface is foisted on us, I predict another huge move to WordPress.

Google revamps Blogger -- is it worth it?

The last time Google revamped Blogger, it was dysfunctional for 6 months or more, and thousands of Blogger users packed it in and moved to Wordpress.I myself started a WordPress blog, and got ready to move completely if Blogger got any worse, but I kept this one open, and eventually Blogger was more or less fixed, and most of the stuff that was broken started working again. But my WordPress blog quickly passed this one in the number of readers, and still gets about twice as many readers a day as this one. 

Now they're at it again. According to their hype, "Introducing the completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts."

Does it live up to the hype?

Not really.

It actually makes it harder to find what you need. Perhaps some of that is unfamiliarity, and we'll get used to it, but the main change is that they've put everything into a smaller type in order to make it harder to read, and they've hidden a lot of functions behind cryptic symbols so you have to hover your cursor all over the screen to find what you're looking for. There used to be a clear and unambiguous label "Edit Posts" and you would get a list of recent posts and drafts that you could edit. Now they've hidden it away behind a cryptic symbol, but I can't remember what it is. In the past (and still on blog posts) they've used a pencil icon for "Edit Post", but now they sometimes use it for creating a new post, so it gets very confusing.

On improvement has been the linking. You can now, when you add a link, choose if you want it to open in a new tab or page by ticking a box, instead of editing it afterwards and typing in 'target="_blank"'. That's a definite improvement.

Another improvement has been in simplifyingt their HTML code. Now if you click on the i for italics it uses the code '...', which is better than the nonsense that the older editor produced, but is still not as good as WordPress's use of the standard HTML '...'.

It seems to put pictures where you want them in posts, rather than putting them at the top and leaving it up to you to move them down if you didn't want it at the top. But its picture placement is still not as easy to use as the one in WordPress. Where it scores over WordPress is in the same ways as it did before -- the use of Javascript widgets, for example.

And then there's some weird stuff:.

On the new Blogger dashboard they say:

Connect Blogger to Google+ and get a suite of new features that will help you build and engage your audience. Learn more.

Well, I clicked on the "learn more", and learnt nothing, zilch, nada.

All it does is that it gives you some hype about Google+. It tells you nothing about what happens when you connect your blog to Google+, which is what I wanted to "learn more" about. It also doesn't tell you if you can disconnect it if you don't like what happens.


And this seems to lead into and link up to this: Can We Still Trust Google? – Danny Brown

The South Africa blogosphere, unravelled

Amatomu's slogan used to be "The South African blogosphere, sorted."

Well, now it has become unsorted, because Amatomu no longer seems to work. To "unravel" means to pull a knitted garment apart so that all you have is separate strands of wool, and you can no longer see the pattern or shape of the garment, or even the garment itself. It has gone.

And one by one the tools that I used to use to find interesting blogs have gone, or become unusable.

The first to go was Technorati. It's still there, I think, but it's no longer useful. It used to have tags that found blog posts with particular topic tags, but that no longer works. It's become a thinly disguised advertising gimmick.

The next to go was Blog Catalog. That's still there, but some whiz kid who had never heard of the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" decided to "improve" it. Now it no longer works.

Then it was the turn of MyBlogLog. Yahoo! bought it as a successful running concern from the original developers, and then pulled the plug on it. Yahoo! does that a lot. They did it with Geocities, they did it with Webrings, and they did it with MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog were social blogrolling sites. They allowed each person to sort the blogosphere according to their own preference, but in such a way that others could see them and join in, the theory being that if you liked someone's blog, you might like the blogs they liked, and the people who liked their blog might like yours. Since those two disappeared from the scene, I've lost contact with a whole bunch of blogs that I used to read, and I missed them. I found some again and put them in my blogroll, but that doesn't tell me how often the writers of those blogs visit my blog, as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog used to do.

But there was still Amatomu for South African blogs. You could see who had posted what recently, and which recent articles were most popular and so on. But now even that's gone.

There's still Afrigator, but I've never understood its user inferface, and no matter how much time I spend on it I never seem to find anything I'm looking for.

Occasionally someone comments on my blog, and I think, hey, I used to read your blog, but I haven't seen it for a long time, and now I no longer know how to find it.

It's all rather sad.

And when I say it's sad people say, you must move on... move on to Facebook and imbibe popular culture and immerse yourself in banal and trivial stuff like "What my friends think I do, what my mom thinks I do, what my boss thinks I do" and so on.

Blogging's better, but it's getting harder to find the good blogs.

Notes from underground: six years old today

Today is this blog's blogiversary, six years old today. I called it Notes from underground because I'd just re-read Dostoevsky's novel of that name, and thought it would be rather nice.

Here are the first couple of posts, rather experimental Notes from underground: November 2005.

The world has changed a bit since then.

Back then I was saying that our President Thabo Mbeki, for all his faults, was a lot better than George Bush and Tony Blair.

Now I would say that our President Jacob Zuma, whatever his good points, is no better than Barack Obama and David Cameron, and in some respects a lot worse.

I don't know how many posts I've written in this blog over the last few years, but different statistics report somewhere between 110000 and 138000 page reads, and visitors mostly come from:

United States - 45,166
United Kingdom - 9,163
South Africa - 6,393
Germany - 4,645
Canada - 3,004
Russia - 2,267
Denmark - 2,045
Australia - 1,836
Netherlands - 1,673
Slovenia - 1,394

The puzzling one there is Slovenia. Why Slovenia, I wonder?

Before starting this blog I used LiveJournal, but it was a bit clunky and difficult to use. It was intended more as a journal than a blog, and after seeing quite a lot of Blogger blogs I thought I'd try it out, and I was impressed with the ease of just sitting down and writing something.

What was most impressive was tools like the "Blog this" one, which made it easy to save the URL of a web site and comment on it, which is what blogging was originally all about.

At that time Blogger had just been taken over by Google, and about three months after I began using it Google decided to "improve" it, which meant that many features that I liked most, including "Blog this", stopped working. Google seemed to be taking their time about bringing in the replacements for the missing features, and at that time many bloggers switched from Blogger to WordPress, because Blogger was broken for about 18 months.

Eventually I too started a WordPress blog, mainly to see how it worked, in case I too had to switch, but quite soon after that Blogger was fixed, and so I began using both in parallel. Each of these blogging platforms had its strong points. WordPress was better for graphics, and also used straightforward HTML markup, whereas blogger used about a lot of commands just to display something like italic text (what it puts behind the scenes for that is italic text, whereas Wordpress uses the straightforward italic text).

But Blogger is much better at displaying third-party Javascript widgets, some of which are quite useful.

So where I posted something would depend largely on which features of the blogging platform I wanted to use. If I wanted pictures with captions, I'd use Wordpress, while for pictures without captions, Blogger would do, though if there were many pictures you would have to move them individually to where you wanted them, whereas WordPress puts them where in the post you want them to go.

Blogger remains better for quick and dirty web-logging -- using "Blog this" to post a link to a web page and comment on it.

I'm not sure why, but my WordPress blog, though started later, gets about twice as many visitors as this one.

And for quicker and dirtier stuff I've found Tumblr even better, so both this one and the WordPress one feed into Tumblr to be summarised.

SA Blogging Awards

Just got a message to say that the SA Blogging Awards close today. I didn't realise they had opened because Telkom had reduced our bandwidth without informing us, and so we were without Web access for four days. Not that it makes much difference, because the SA Blogging Awards are just as narrow-minded this year as they were last year.

The categories to enter have been simplified this year, and are as follows:

• Best Business / Political Blog
• Best Entertainment / Lifestyle Blog
• Best Environmental Blog
• Best Fashion Blog
• Best Food & Wine Blog
• Best Music Blog
• Best Photographic Blog
• Best Science and Technology Blog
• Best Sport Blog
• Best Travel Blog

Please choose a category which best fits your blog.

None of my blogs, nor any of the blogs I regularly read, fits into any of those categories. The organisers seem to have a very blinkered view of human life. Or is is just me?

As far as I can see there are huge swathes of human life and experience (which is what most blogs are about) missing from the list. I think quite a large number of the missing ones are covered by the H*U*M*A*N*I*T*I*E*S. As, of course, are the categories in Digg, which I avoid for the same reason.

I really think that blogging awards thingies should not be run by technogeeks. For them things like art, literature, history and religion simply do not exist.

Is there anything else you can see that has been left out?

Carpenter's Shoes: Fun with Technorati

I've just visited Technorati for the second time this month. and that's probably also for the second time this year.

This time it was the result of reading Carpenter's Shoes: Fun with Technorati

Technorati provide blog ranking stats (www.technorati.com) It's a bit of a mission to find out the rankings of the South African religion blogs that I am interested in, but there are a few that I check once in a blue moon. Blog rankings are based on what Technorati calls authority.

My previous visit to Technorati this month was because I got an email asking me to take part in a survey on the state of the blogosphere. Though the survey wasn't very satisfactory, if you are a blogger it might well be worth taking part in it, as the more who do so, the better the picture it will give of the state of the blogosphere, despite its flaws.

But Jenny Hillebrand's post on Carpenter's Shoes got me thinking about why I only visit Technorati once or twice a year, if that. A few years ago I used to visit the site three or four times a week.

What has changed?

Well the Technorati site has changed.

Back then it had stuff that interested me as a blogger. I could go there to find blogs and blog posts I was interested in. There used to be "Technorati tags", and one could click on them to find who was blogging on what topics. If I was going to blog on a subject, I'd look up tags related to that subject, and if those blogs said anything interesting on the topic, I'd link to them.

Now, however, you can't find stuff that you find interesting on Technorati. If you look at their tags page, for example, you can't search for tags. They only show you the currently popular tags for the last month. Do not expect Technorati to give you what you like. You WILL like what Technorati gives you and tells you to like. There is a kind of arrogant authoritarian flavour to it.

What is going on here?

I suspect that Technorati was started by a bunch of bloggers who enjoyed blogging and tried to produce a tool that would be useful to bloggers and that bloggers would like. And it grew a bit beyond their capacity and they needed a bit of capital injection to keep it going and growing.

But capital injection also means that the marketing people come in and have more say, and in their philosophy giving bloggers what they are looking for is no good at all. What is important is to steer bloggers towards the stuff that brings in the most advertising revenue for us.

So they modify it, and tell you:

Welcome to the
new Technorati.com

The blogosphere evolves and so do we.

And that means they make it harder to find what you are looking for, and easier to find the stuff that brings in the most advertising revenue for them. And finding what you are looking for, as Jenny says, is "a bit of a mission."

And that is why I now visit Technorati only once or twice a year, instead of three or four times a week.

Media, Schmedia

Bishop Alan of Buckingham writes some interesting stuff about social media in the vein of Mashall McLuchan, extending McLuhan's thoughts to things McLuhan never knew, and writes about the uses of Facebook, Twitter and other things. Like him, I haven't quite worked out what to do with Google+, but I like what he says about blogs: Bishop Alan’s Blog: Media, Schmedia:

Where does that leave the humble Blog?

As what people used to call a commonplace book, with occasional comment, it’s unbeatable. I need to invest more in it. Some of the comment threads it stimulates turn are fascinating, and it becomes a focus for a form of community. It’s brought great joy this summer to meet a few of the people whose comments I most respect and like. That and the occasional diary or policy reflection does make it worth some effort.

I think his analogy with the commonplace book is spot on. That is certainly what the best blogs have mutated into. In that way they have combined two different ideas into a third, so the word "blog" is something of a misnomer.

Ten or fifteen years ago years ago there were blogs and there were online journals. There were web sites devoted to journals and journaling, and it became quite a popular pastime. Then there were web logs, which soon got shortened to "blogs" - people kept lists of web sites they visited. Some early blogs were just that - lists of links to sites and nothing more. But then people began to add comments on the sites they visited, and so blogs became a kind of review, and people began readingt the treviews of others to see which sites to visit. In some cases the reviews expanded and became articles on their own, sometimes without any reference at all to another web site.

And so in blogs today the idea of the journal and the idea of the web log have merged into what is, in effect, an electronic commonplace book. Indeed, one of the blogs that I like to read is Notes from a Common-place Book.

So what is a commonplace book?

Wikipedia puts it rather well, I think. Commonplace book - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek topos koinos, see literary topos) which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.

Not as personal as a journal, not as impersonal as a web log, the electronic commonplace book has a unique value.

I'm nore aware of this since I'm trying to rebuild my blogroll, after the demise of social blogrolling sites. MyBlogLog was culled by Yahoo! last May. Blog Catalog is waiting for the last rites. And another one spectacularly imploded last week, causing me to delete all my blogrolls.

So now I've lost touch with most of the blogs I liked to read, and am beginning to reconstruct the blog roll, which makes me think of why I liked reading certain blogs. Not that I necessarily agreed with the authors; very often I didn't. But the ones I liked most were usually the ones that were like commonplace books.

Bishop Alan also has some interesting things to say about other social media. He sees Twitter as useful for news, and perhaps it is, if it has links attached. But I find I just do not have the time to wade through dozens of Tweets, so I like the "Daily Paper" digest of the Tweets of the people I follow that have links in them. Its selection sometimes is not brilliant, but it is usually adequate. If you haven't seen it, mine is here.

One thing that Bishop Alan hasn't mentioned is mini-blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous. If Twitter is microblogging, then Tumblr and Posterous are mini-blogging, and if you want a tool for liveblogging at a conference or such, please please please use one of those rather than Twitter. The contextless linkless tweets that emanate from such events are the height of frustration.

But back to the theme of the commonplace book. A blog is useful as a public commonplace book, but not everything I want to keep is really of much interest to anyone other than me, and there is also software for that. One of the best I have found is askSam. I've heard that Microsoft One- Note can do similar things, but it doesn't come with documentation so I don't know how to use it, but askSam might even be a boon to busy bishops.