Saturday, December 03, 2011

Blogger is dying more quickly than expected

I've been expecting Blogger to die, but since Google has been porting it to the "new look" I thought it had a year or two left.

Today when I search in Blogger I'm getting results sorted from oldest to newest, and search ends at 2006. I'm seeing this in both the old and new UI. In the new UI, of course, search is very limited; in particular you can't navigate large numbers of results readily.

Blogger is showing more of these inconsistent and failed behaviors. If Blogger were human, I'd say it had an untreatable cancer.

The good news is that WordPress.com's Blogger Import works fairly well -- though it omits all draft posts.

The bad news is that blogging is tracing the same trajectory I remember with web site authoring. In the 90s web site authoring tools were accessible to relatively non-technical amateurs. By the 00s that market had gone away, and quality "content management systems" were aimed at professionals and businesses. I'm seeing the same thing happening with blogging -- it's becoming a professional activity dominated rather than an amateur form of communication. The number of interesting blogs expressing personal opinions rather than muted convention is also diminishing.

These things are easier to understand if you live in a climate that has ice and snow and darkness.

1 comment:

Stacy said...

So sad! Interesting you should post this, though. I've been looking at WordPress and considering moving over to it at some point in the near future. I'd do it immediately if I had the time to do so. Blogger is really disappointing me.