Wednesday, August 25, 2004

The Navbar

I noticed when I got back from my trip that Blogger had changed things around a little bit. Instead of a banner ad at the top of my blog, I now have the "Navbar". My initial response was one of annoyance -- it obstructed the top half of the title of my blog. This, of course, was easily fixed with a minor modification to my template. And once I started looking at its features, I started coming around -- it's smaller and more attractive than the old banner ads were, and the search functionality is something that I will actually use. I also thought it might be fun to use the "Next Blog" function to go visit random blogs, and maybe find some more sites worth reading. In that, I've been sorely disappointed. I've clicked through to dozens of blogs, and found none at all that interested me. Very few of them have anything substantive to say at all, and many are not in English, the only language in which I'm fluent. Blogger may be out of luck here; I'm afraid the random blog button will not be very useful to many -- it may be that bloggers just don't have all that much in common with one another (or, possibly, most of them just don't have much in common with me). But Google is good about associating pages and topics with one another -- couldn't the 'next blog' button send me to another blog that statistics suggest I'd be interested in reading? They can see what topics I'm writing about, what blogs I'm linking to, etc. I wouldn't think it'd be too hard to give me random targeted references. Then browsing new blogs really could be interesting and fun.

1 comment:

  1. I actually was just reading a blog in the knitting blogs ring that was wondering what non-knitters thought of knitting blogs.

    I see that button as being something like browsing the 'recently returned' shelf in a library. Yes, they are all books, but they're on a staggering variety of subjects. Some of them are the last thing you'd ever want to read, others might be ones you've seen before and are glad to see again, and maybe, just maybe, are something that you'd never pick up off the main shelves, but, once you see them, you realize you really like. (Of course, this doesn't account for all of the partially-finished ones.)

    (real blog: http://homepage.mac.com/nikandre/iblog/index.html

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