Another day and Blogger is still screwing me

I STILL can't succesfully upload a photo. What gives? Megan uploaded a photo. What makes her so special and me a pile of shit? I've got photos I want to upload, dammit.

And now I learn that Blogger, already owned by Google, is being assimilated into the whole Google Accounts nexus of services. Voluntary at this point, eventually the Blogger-only accounts will be eliminated and you'll have to convert your blogs over to the new Google Accounts system in order to keep them. I hesitated, because they say you "can't go back," but I'll do whatever it takes to get the godforsaken photo uploading to work again.

I looked over the new "features" of what they're calling Blogger Beta, and nothing there excited me too much. They say it will be easier to do new posts in the Dashboard, and there will be no waiting for a blog to be republished when an entry is added. Instead, the blog will build itself "on the fly," whenever it's accessed by a reader. Can't say that I care about that, but if it works better, I'm all for it.

And there's a whole thing about creating "private" blogs that can only be accessed by those whose e-mail address are approved in the system. It's supposed to be for "family" type blogs, or perhaps business-related ones. I guess it's just another way to communicate between individuals or groups. My whole idea of blogging is that it's supposed to be there for all to see (or ignore, as it were), but I can see the value in using blogging technology for other, less-public forms of communication.

I remember when I first heard the word "blog." I had no clue. In the past, I had published my own Web pages through Yahoo, but I didn't understand what a blog was all about. Well, the whole thing blew up pretty fast, and the Web became, for a short while, all about blogs. Now that blogging has jumped the shark (was it the Huffington Post that signaled the "jump the shark" moment?), it can be seen as what it is: a software mechanism and organizational method for presenting content on the Web. How's that for heavy theory? More simply put -- blogging helps people manage the information they want to publish on the Web. It arranges it by chronology and topic, and it streamlines the presentation and programming required. That wasn't any simpler. Damn.