Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Better late than never

We’ve added a fair bit to Blogger over the years, but one thing that’s been constant for some time has been our collection of templates. While a number of talented designers around the web have offered their own fresh and interesting designs that you can apply to your Blogger blog, our stock set has grown a bit stale, and you’ve noticed. You let us know — in the forums, on Twitter, sitting next to us on airplanes, even from across the counter at a Harvard Square stationary store, and we’ve been listening.

Today we’re taking a big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog.

via bloggerindraft.blogspot.com

Long overdue, but it looks pretty good. It seems as if they copied the layout UI that Posterous uses for customizing a blogs design. They've got a lot of great color schemes to pick from and it offers an incredibly level of granularity over the layout. It's unclear to me why it takes the Blogger team forever to roll out new features. I would have thought that post-Goolge acquisition they would have the resources to roll things out on a more regular basis. WordPress pushes out new features at least twice a year, while it seems to take Blogger a year to add what are not considered basic features for blogging platforms.

There is one thing that's rather peculiar though—why is 'Impact' a font choice? That's got to be a bug or a joke. I can't imagine that anyone thought that was a good idea.

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Blogs may not need any design at all

Smashing Magazine recently wrote an article about blogs and design titled, "The Death Of The Blog Post." It's a really great article and well... really well designed. They explore the idea of a “blogazine” – a highly stylized blog that reads more like a print magazine (and the article itself is formatted in such a way). But I can’t help but wonder if you really need to design a blog at all.

What purpose does having a well designed blog serve? Do you expect people to check your blog every day?

Most of the blogs that I find valuable I read through Google Reader. Those who really appreciate what you have to say will rarely even see your design, because they’ll consuming your content through an RSS reader. All that beautiful design work only gets seen by passing visitors. The only time I ever see the design of a blog is when: (a) It’s the first time I’ve visited the site; or (b) I’m just passing through.

I can’t help but wonder if the future of the “blogazine” might be more in the realm application development instead of website development. The New York Times has an Adobe Air application called the Times Reader – which is a digital version of their newspaper – but it’s not just a translation of their website or the print version. They thought about what reading a newspaper on a screen should be like and then developed an application around it. Adobe AIR is still a relative new technology, but it allows designers a new canvas for presenting themselves and their work. I can absolutely see a future where blogs like Smashing Magazine or GOOD Magazine have an Adobe AIR application that offers readers a unique experience beyond the walls of the browser.

I’m not sure that blogs ever really need to be designed. I love Smashing Magazine, and everything they have to say about design, but the truth is that this was probably the first time in weeks I’d actually looked at an article on their website instead of just reading the feed in an RSS reader.

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Understanding the massiveness of Google

At the time of writing this, Google has about 20,000 employees and over $30 billion in assets. It's a massive company, but it's hard to wrap your head around what 20,000 people look like or what billions in assets even means. The massiveness of Google is lost on most people, including myself until I started looking into it. I wanted to get a better understanding of how one might use things like Google Code, the Google App Engine, or the Google Web Toolkit.

A few interesting tidbits about Google:

  • 87 different Twitter accounts
  • Over 100 active blogs
  • Over 1,000 YouTube videos

You might have seen a few of their blogs, but they have so many that they have their own blog directory, including regional blogs which provide localized information to people all over the world. There are teams running project that I didn't even know existed, like the O3D API team – which is working on a multi-platform plugin that allows 3D rendering within the browser.

One of the ideas me and a few coworkers had a while back was to create a presentation along the lines, "Everything you ever wanted to know about Google." The thing is, you couldn't fit that into a presentation. You would have trouble fitting it into a 10-part series. I'm starting to think that it may be adventageous for companies, particularly digital companies, to have a person who's job it is to understand Google and everything they offer. Search is massive enough, but they also own YouTube – which is the largest content channel on the Internet. And now they are getting into phones and even operating systems. They offer APIs for almost everything. Understanding all those different points of integration and how they might fit into a site or application would be a huge asset.

Google isn't just a search company. In many ways, Google is the Internet. If tomorrow Google disappeared, the entire world would grind to a hault. Google isn't often ranked with the likes of General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell or HSBC Holdings; but it's just as important—if not more so. It is more intertwined in the lives of everyone than I think most people realize. And as they move into new territory with Google Wave and Google Voice, Google is just going to become a more integral part of our everyday lives.

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Magic makes it possible

Only have a 10 minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the "Feed settings" menu of your feed (or folder) to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be.
via googlereader.blogspot.com

The above excerpt is a taken from the Official Google Reader Blog about a relatively new feature in Google Reader called "Sort by magic."

Today I was talking to a few people about how I manage to stay up to date with everything that's happening on the interwebs. The answer to that question has changed over the years, but for the past few weeks I've been making extensive use of a new feature in Google Reader which lets you sort through RSS feeds by "magic."

I have about 100 different RSS and Atom feeds that are grouped into a few larger folders (blogs, desgin, comics, etc.), and I sort by magic for each of those folders. The really interesting thing about "Sort by magic" is that it's personalized. The algorithm bubbles things to the top based on what you've been reading, liking, and sharing. Even if two people have the exact same list of feeds, Google Reader will display a different list of articles for for each person.

Feeds are a tricky thing to manage, especially today when bloggers and publishers are racing to put out as much content as possible. This new magical feature is quite remarkable. It's a great filter for anyone who subscribes to more than a dozen feeds and doesn't have the entire day to read through them. If you aren't using it, you should be.

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