Technics: Google Blogger: One step forward, two steps back, to the X power

Google has gained fame, and now notoriety, upon the purchase and re-jigging of the blog host, Blogger thru which refWrite Backpage is published. In recent months, the re-jigging has included a Blogger Beta which lately has been transformed into Blogger Beta or New Blogger.

When a Blogger-user follows the corporate lead, and converts over to New Blogger, certain new features become available. A small feature has been relevant to refWrite's overall blogging vision and strategy. We've wanted to advance the vision of a multi-member work-community for reformational journalism online in the blog-medium. That's now possible but tedious to establish; it just ain't easy, not inviting.

First, to bring a second blog-poster into the picture, you need to join blogger with an email address distinct from your new Google email addres (functionally, Google seems to want all of these prefereably to be be, you guessed it, Gmail addresses; something hard to attain without separate computers). In any case, to post a blog-entry to a given page, like rW4, a blogger has to go thru the maze of signing-into Old Blogger, get re-routed from there to another page for signing-in to New Blogger, only to then have the username and password rejected, with a note appearing in fine print to click on, if you want to enter as a different user.

Of course, as in my case, you're still you--but you don't get a list of your various user names where you can click the one to use for a given blog-entry post. Instead you have innumerable steps to undertake before you can get your alternative username and password signed-in for purpose of presenting to you a fresh posting-composition page, that will come out in the blogosphere for your readers, but under a different name following "Posted by ..." at the bottom of the blog-entry.

This anti-blogger rigamoroll is contrived to allow integration around Google's own poorly-conceived needs. But what you want is integration around you as the center of your various Google-served bloggerly activities. There are several reasons why a blogger may want to use three or four different names following "Posted by ..." on a given page, or set of inter-linked pages. Some of these have to do with classifying the different kinds of content regarding which a blogger may be actively blogging. In my case, for years I blogged with a signature line in each blog-entry, differing the signatures acccording to the category of the content. I used the semiotic mark "--" followed by the blogger name appropriate to that content.

But always all the posted blog-entries were further designated by Blogger on its own terms (contradicting mine and confusing my readers). Then, upon purchase of Blogger, the Google machinery kicked in with what in the end amounts to the the same old, same old "Posted by ..." single signifer. I respnded to a new feature, that did a little something along the lines I wanted, but at considerable cost.

Technotes, by Technowlb

When I left Blogger behind to become part of Blogger Beta by Google, I got the chance to use my DotMac email addresses, instead of only the newly required Beta address at Gmail: but only if I took on all the arbitrary rigamaroll involved in signing-in differently to one or another of my posting names newly establised with Google Blogger.

(I only mention in passing two other reasons for strongly preferring multiple user names and email addresses: branding; and fictional work woven into the texture of a given blogpage. Branding by use of a distinct posted-by name that is indigenous to a given content, helps to build name-recognition for that kind of content attributed to that particular name, while a different posted-by-name becomes associated strictly to a different kind of content. There could be perhaps two or three or four kinds of content (each kind with its distinct brand/username) interwoven into a single timeline of posts on a page devoted to those posts.

The fictional element would occur when the different posted-by names on a given blog-page or set of inter-linked pages are laced with characterizations, whereby one "character" emerging around a particular posted-by name may include a passing comment about a different "character" (bearing a different posted-by name), so that a perhaps quite-thin but real and perhaps fascinating buildup of distinct blog-literary characters occurs as you blog about different contents that may be diversely juridical, political, economic, pisteutic (faithic / explicitly religious), scientific, aesthetic, technic, etc.)

However, the problems of being enmeshed in the rigours of using Google's New Blogger are compounded when one finds use of other features of Google's Web2.0 suite, whether directly in conjunction with New Blogger or not.

For instance, if you use New Blogger in relation to several posted-by names, you have to be extremely and tediously careful in trying to use simultaneously Google Bookmarks. In turn, each posted-by name by which you sign into Google (Blogger) gets a different Google Homepage (which I hate, I want one Google Homepage with quick access to all Google Blogger posted-by names). Going to any newspage from any one of your Google Homepages (which happens whether you personalize it/them or not) determines in advance where your bookmarking will occur. I want to use Google's Bookmarks in a set according to different posted-by names, again according to my basic categories of content. But that means, when I surf the news and pickout valuable bookmarks for three or four different topics (each associated separately to a different posted-by name), I have to stop, sign into New Blogger, go thru the labyrinth to get to the specific username and password for which I want to enter a given bookmark. This is so clunky, time-consuming and dispriting that it dehydrates the joy of blogging out of the process, replacing it with elaborate technical routine only. Nonsensical from the standpoint of the blogger.

Google has lost s+t of the living blogger who may wish to combine journalism, opinion, and new forms of textual artistry thru differentiated posted-by naming, designed to interlace fictional elements that build up a sense of characterization, name by name. Instead, Google has made its Web2.0 suite a corporate n+tmare based on a qualitatively different point of view from that of the serious blogger. It determines for the blogger a different and alien point of integration for her/his own complex and aesthetically-nuanced blogging process--namely, its own corporate machinery and machinations.