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| I even stopped typing to do this, and I realized my writing made no sense because I was so discombobulated by it all. (This was observed on October 7, 2025.) |
I kid you not.
Anyhoo, here's the original thing I noticed when I popped up Blogger today this afternoon*
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| On October 7, 2025. |
Under the header of "Who asked for this crap?", I was almost instantly annoyed by this new Blogger "feature".
How about Widgets that are kept up to date, or you can put YouTube Channels (or other social media (tm) channels) into your blog without having to figure out the arcane systems on your own?
Or, in my case, how about bringing my freaking blog into Google Search itself? You know, the thing you tout as the best search engine on the internet?
But noooo... We get an option to add Google Search and Google Search links and previews to our blogs, thus creating "a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google".
Right. Because long form writing needs to be turned into something more "engaging". (As in... "shorter".)
/sigh
*I was not home for part of the day, taking my mom's car in for maintenance.
I saw Heartless post about this earlier today and I had no idea where he'd seen it so I started a draft post to look for it and there was no sign of it. And now I've read your post and looked again and I still can't see it, even with the screenshots to guide me. I don't even have that little bell for the Notices. I see it's in beta though. Maybe not everyone has access yet or perhaps you have to opt in to see beta features?
ReplyDeleteYou know, that's even more amusing since you're visible to the Google search engine, but I'm not.
DeleteWell, if they want this to simply vanish into the ether, they picked the right blog...
I noticed this on my Neverwinter blog when I dusted that one off, but it doesn't show on any of my actually active blogs, which I thought was an interesting choice. I pressed it just to see what would happen but didn't notice any visible changes to my post, so just discarded it. Either it doesn't work (it is in beta after all) or it does something wonky. But yeah, I had a similar reaction - this is what Google decided to add to Blogger in 2025?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that Google is thinking that they're throwing us a bone to keep Blogger relevant, but at this point the people left on Blogger are those who aren't concerned about being up with the latest social media stuff. Unless people are ironically coming back to long form blogging like how people rediscovered vinyl records (and now cassettes).
DeleteI suspect ad revenue from Google search is down due to their own enshittification of their main product, so there's pressure to have more searches somehow. Someone familiar with Blogger came up with this idea to make every blog post include five links to searches and they were like "sure, why not, it can't hurt".
DeleteI just got a notification this morning that Gemini apps will now include "publicly available data from YouTube, Google Maps, Google Flights and Google Hotels" whether you want it or not. Previously you could switch this feature off. Now you can't. That also tracks with trying to drive more traffic through search. I often wonder what would happen if businesses just stopped advertizing altogether. The infrastructure is all there now for people to find anything they want and it's never been clear (Or provable) that advertizing beyond a certain fairly basic level increases profits and yet almost everything we do now relies on advertizing revenue just to exist.
DeleteSorry, in the interests of accuracy I should say that advertizing does work, competitively, to increase or hold market share. The grey area has always been whether it increases the size of the overall market. Evidence there strongly suggests it does nothing. It's basically a Mexican stand-off. No-one dares put the gun down first.
DeleteI saw an AI assistant button had appeared on mine, but I completely ignored it. Literally half the point of my blog is practicing the craft of writing in a low stakes setting, so letting AI "help me" with it would be like letting a robot lift weights for me in a gym. So I really haven't got the foggiest idea what, if anything, it would do for me.
ReplyDeleteHell if I know what it does outside of putting in "hidden" writing that causes it to show up on searches more aggressively. No, I don't know that for certain, but I've seen it done before...
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