Blogging is Dead

Everybody seems to be writing about a controversial blog post that stated that blogging is dead. Somebody special said they were hanging up their blogging hat. Their plan was to resort to e-mailing their blog info instead. The rational behind this move was that mainstream media was starting to monopolize the blog universe. Another was that people had moved on to other mediums such as MySpace, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter.

There are some statistics which seem to indicate that the rate of new blog creation is slowing down as well. In July of 2006, there were 175k blogs being created per day. By March of 2008, the rate had fallen to 120k blogs created per day. The topic of whether blogging is dead is an interesting one I want to explore.

I think that it has become clear that blogging is not easy. It is not easy to sell a blog or create a sustainable business around one. There is not really a quick buck to be made here. You almost need to blog daily to have a shot. You need commitment. It can be very difficult to get any sort of discussion going on a blog.

The long term question is whether blogging is a fad. Will people stop updating the majority of blogs causing them to die? Some existing blogs such as TechCrunch so no sign of ever slowing down. And they seem to be profitable as well. Perhaps the authors of blogs such as these have already determined that with hard word, and with a high quality blog, that results will follow.

I have some things to say about my personal take on this topic, since I dream of getting rich by blogging. I have a number of blogs that I have started. But my story is a topic for another post.

Who Else Likes Blogger

Every once in a while I like to find people on Blogger that share my interests. So I go to my Blogger profile which is set up to list my interests. Then I click on one of the words I list as interesting. Blogger automatically shows me me a list of other Blogger profiles which also list those interests. I found 751 other Bloggers users who like "Blogger" as an interest. Here are blogs by 5 other Blogger users who list Blogger as an interest.

Check out PCWizKids Tech Talk. I think his motto is "You don't have to be geek to tweak". The blog appears to be 2 years old. And there are a number of videos that teach you how to do tech things.

There is a neat layout on Lily Yessss' Majoring in Economics blog. It looks like there is only one blog post per page. But the page itself has an inner scroll bar on the left. It looks a little weird next to the brower scroll bar.

Random Me is a blog that seems to concnetrate on pictures of animals. That may seem like a strange description. But the animals all seem cute. Some of them are pictures of stuffed animals. Do you get the picture? If not check out the blog.

If you want to see a lot of fashion models, head over to That's Fashion. There are a lot of pictures on this blog. Watch out though. Like some cutting edge fashion, there is the occasional nude picture.

Finally I enjoyed reading The Dummies Guide to Google Blogger. It has a nice layout. And it seems to try to teach you the ins and outs of Blogger.

That's all for now. I encounrage you to check out other people on Blogger who share your interest. You will be surprised at the kind of variety you will find. Sure there is some chaff. But you might discover some treasure if you look carefully. Happy blogging.

Proper Layout

Recently I opened a blog post about writing a build system. This was a very apt post as my team is working on porting our build system to use new versions of our tools. We are encountering some pain and developers are looking to improve the build system. I knew immediately after looking at the blog post that something was wrong. There were a bunch of links aligned down the left hand side of the page. This by itself is not a huge problem. However the link text appeared on top of the blog text. The effect was that I could not read the text of the blog post.

Now I am not sure why this was happening. I am running Internet Explorer version 6. Perhaps the blog author is using some complex HTML tricks that are not supported in IE6. Or maybe there are some bugs in IE6 preventing the correct display of his pages. I don’t know. But I do know that it was very difficult to view the blog text. I had to carefully copy just the blog text to the Windows clipboard, then paste it into something like Microsoft Word to read it. This author was lucky that I was so hungry for his blog topic to go this far.

I think my experience points to two very important lessons. 1. If you topic is hot, readers will go far to read your post. 2. For maximum exposure you will want to make sure that everybody can correctly view your blog.

Now I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that my blogs hosted on Blogger are easily viewed on most browsers. I will confess that I only tester my blogs using Internet Explorer version 6, and sometimes Netscape Navigator and Mozilla FireFox. But my instinct tells me my stock Blogger layouts are safe for the viewing public.

The State of Blogger

I am totally paranoid about Blogger now. Every time I write a post to one of my blogs, I copy and paste the text into Notepad before clicking the Publish Post button. Been burned too many times with Blogger errors that caused me to lose all my data.

Today I thought I would write about a less serious but still telltale problem I have with Blogger. I like to add images to many of my posts. It gives them a fresh and interesting looking. However when I click the Add Image button in Blogger, I get a window that looks like the one shown above. Notice anything strange about the Cancel and Upload Image buttons? Yeah they are cut off. And it is not that the rest of the buttons are visible if I scroll the window down further. The window is scrolled all the way down.

Yes. I can still make out the text on these buttons. And when I click them, the upload to Blogger usually works. However in my mind this is typical of the state of Blogger. It is always seems a bit broke down like a 3rd rate blogging site. Why do I stick with it? I got a bunch of blogs with many posts already entered. It would be a huge pain for me to move them somewhere else. And I have invested in getting a lot of links to my Blogger URLs. All the work getting those links would have been wasted if I switch now.

Blogger rant off, for now.

Blogger Acting Up Again

Just when you think you are out of the water, the shark known as Blogger comes up to bite you. Today I submitted a post to my IBM Tools blog on Client/Server and DB Objects. Prior to publishing this large post, I saved the text to a Notepad file. The post published fine. So I assumed all was well with Blogger.

Then I tried to follow this post up with another one about DB2 storage, SQL, and security. I did not bother to backup the text prior to publishing. Big mistake. Blogger choked and gave me an error message. My text was lost. This is all too familiar of a horrific experience. Can't Blogger remain stable for even one day? What kind of buggy system are they running over there at Google?

I might have to start copying and pasting the text each time before I submit a post. Because I don't like losing my data due to Blogger hiccups. Or maybe I should write up my posts in another editor, then copy then to Blogger. This only works if the post is just plain text. It is not as easy when you have images and URL links in the post. I just wish Blogger could be stable enough to not lose my data. Yes I understand it is a free service. But at this point, if it keeps losing my data, it is worth less than free to me. Know what I mean?

P.S. While I am ranting about Blogger, does anybody else find the auto complete function in the labels edit annoying?

GMail Conversations

I have Gmail accounts that correspond to my Blogger accounts. And I recently noticed something strange. Today I received a number of e-mails from Ad Engage. But when I went back to check some of the details, it seemed like there was only one e-mail on my Gmail page.

Then I figured the number in parentheses next to the sender must have had something to do with it. It turns out that Gmail automatically bunches e-mails in the "same conversation" together on one line. You have to open the e-mail and choose the stacking tabs to see each separate e-mail message.

I searched all over the Gmail settings, but could not find a way to turn this feature off. It was very annoying. This is not intuitive in my opinion. Judging from the number of questions posted to Google Groups about this very feature, I guess a lot of other people share my opinion.

If you use Gmail, be aware that messages from the same sender can "stack" in your Inbox.

Spell Check Option

I thought I would take the time to praise the "Check Spelling" option available in Blogger. Most of the time this button works. And when it does, I usually have some misspellings in my posts. Blogger has a good user interface for the spell check. They highlight potentials misspellings in yellow. Then Blogger provides alternate spellings it thinks that I meant. Not having correct spellings can make a blog look unprofessional. This is a nice touch that helps my blogs look crisp.

One funny think about the spell checker is that it often marks competitor names as misspellings. However all things Google appear to be in their dictionary. I am not sure if this is something of a joke with the developers of Blogger, or a business decision to subtly take down the opposition. Either way it has me LOL.

P.S. This post alone had 5 items flagged as misspellings.

Note to Blogger Team - Please add "LOL" to your spell check dictionary.