Whenever I read blogs, especially those amongst the self-proclaimed IndieWeb, they usually say that there's no point in using Blogger, before pointing to Google's track record to killing off services which are barely used. They're not wrong on that, by the way, Blogger has been owned by Google for 25 years and yet somehow it's avoided the cull that other websites, Google+ the most prominent, avoided. And Google themselves are far from an admirable company - their pushing of AI on searches has worsened the quality of internet searches by a lot, even if the results are occasionally amusing.
I'm currently writing this post at Imperial, so arguably shouldn't even be typing this up right now - why am I not revising hybridisation instead? Usually, this would mean I can't add links to blogposts until I get home...until this new update came out on Blogger, which does two things:
1. (Officially) Based on your blog content, Blogger will automatically identify key words and phrases in your post and insert search links in case your readers want to explore more. In Compose view, look for the pencil icon at the top-right of the page to get started.
2. (Unofficially) Confirms that Blogger is not dead.
Now, the former I strongly assume is AI based, and not just because you definitely don't have a human updating your post as soon as you press a button. I've already used this feature on the most recent Talk Talk posts, which, lo and behold, merely added loads of hyperlinks for phrases like "synthpop" and "Clair de Lune". The former redirected to a Google search for "define synthpop", and I'm not entirely sure this would be useful to a reader, but maybe that's because giving a dictionary definition to someone won't really inform them that much about the scope of the topic. I haven't checked the Clair de Lune link, but U reckon it's probably the same.
It feels like there's both lots of untapped potential here, as well as just being completely pointless. The whole point of blogging is to write, and I feel like delegating even a bit of that process to AI demeans that. Surely it should be up to the writer to add links to things which matter and can inform the reader, instead of...this. And yes, there isn't much to add to a blogging platform in 2025 - most of the things you can think of have probably been done already - but even so, is incorporating AI actually any good?
At least this is proof Blogger is unlikely to die. But I fear it's just postponing the inevitable.
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