June 27, 2005

Dear Feature Creepers

Two of my favorite blogging tools, Technorati and Blogger, have done me some favors I didn't ask for this week. Again. Blogger is infamous for this. It's like this: You don't like donuts but that's really neither here nor there because you usually don't run across donuts in your morning travels. Then one day you wake up to find that someone's put a donut on your face while you were asleep.

That's what using Blogger is like when they decide to improve things.

I don't like the "I'm to lame to live" new image upload feature. Yes, it allows even the most helpless blogger upload an image, as long as they pay for blogger pro, and at the same time, forces the bloggers who had been happy uploading them into their long-standing subdirectory and layng them out as they wish, into yet another pat process.

On to Technorati. I was part of the beta review bunch and sent a rather thoughtful email on my various likes and dislikes. I never got a response, so I don't know if anyone read it. But it was nice to be invited to participate and I love checking out betas.

I thought I made the point in my feedback that the most important thing technorati does--it's a search engine after all--is to provide search results, not all these fluffy 'current books' and 'what watchlists do I have today' everywhere I look.

So, when I do a search on my own URL as a blogger, you know, it would seem logical to give me those results -- not JUST FOUR of them, but maybe 10-20 at a time (or however many at a time we want to see on a page--let me decide) WITHOUT HAVING TO CLICK A LINK TO GET ALL FOUR MILLION LINKS -- A LINK THAT TIMES OUT BEFORE IT EVER GIVES ME THE REST OF THE RESULTS I'M LOOKING FOR.



By the way, who's Squid?