Playing with Technology

Have any of you other denizens of the blogging culture out there on the internets ever tried playing with the "NEXT BLOG >>" button in the blogger bar on the top of this page?

Let me tell you, it's actually kind of fun. Chances are if you're reading this blog today for the first time it's because I started following your blog or something and you're wondering how I got there. Wonder no longer! It was, dear, sweet, lost readers, the magic of the Next Blog button. I surfed through the next blogs from this site as well as my Galway Rover site and was amazed at how focused the Village Wordsmithy is when it comes to subject matter. How did I reach that conclusion?

Here's how I think the Next Blog works -- using your tags or your content or a mixture of both the Google gurus sift through the millions of other blogs they're currently hosting to pull out works similar to yours. The Next Blogs on this site bring you to more writers, poets, and, perhaps not surprisingly, more educators.

(On a side note, I'm really, really happy that I'm not the only person who thought of putting students' work online for critique. Some people seem to think this suggestion would incite more internet bullying. I think these people need to give it a chance, since I would argue the anonymity of the internet (and some non-obvious psyeudonyms) might actually enable kids to share more. But whatever.)

The Galway Rover lacks more focus -- hit the next button there and the Google gurus bounce you around travel blogs, personal rants about foreign policy, and, again unsurprisingly, food blogs. (Did I really talk about food that much?)

As Jack Aubrey would say, What a terribly modern age we live in.