Blogger's "Next Blog" button is broken

The “Next Blog” button displays on all of the free Blogger hosted blogs. It takes you to a random recently updated blog.

The button isn’t broken from a technical standpoint. But once upon a time you could keep hitting it and you’d catch a decent percentage of blogs worth reading.

Not so anymore. Half the blogs seem to be spam blogs (which are supposed to show up in Google search results and the blog author hopes someone will click on one of the ads—either that or they’re supposed to help boost some other site’s search engine visibility by linking to it).

Of the non-spam blogs, half of those seem to be in a foreign language.

Of the quarter of the blogs that are not spam and are in English, half are teenage blogs with awful templates and unreadable grammar/style.

Of the eighth that are not teenage blogs, half seem to be devoted to Christianity and Jesus.

In the end that leaves only one blog in sixteen worth looking at, and most of those suck as well.

A much better way to view random blogs is to go to the Typepad homepage where there’s a list of recently updated Typepad blogs. Because Typepad is a pay service, it weeds out nearly all of the spam blogs, the teenage blogs, and other low quality blogs. Foreign language blogs are also a lot rarer.

* * *

On my third attempt this morning at picking random Typepad blogs, I found a very interesting post about what it means to be Asian. The author writes:

And maybe you wouldn't think someone assuming I'm smart is a bad thing. But it can be annoying, especially when it isn't based on anything but my race. Why can't we just be of average intelligence and depicted as so?

One of the problems with America is that people think being smart isn’t cool.

Comments

[Amy]

I'm Asian...

Being smart is cool...I'm probably the smartest in my school but seriously, even compliments get annoying. Plus, I have people hating me because I'm smart. So being smart isn't as cool as you think. Also, my mom was saying about how now, at really good universities, they only accept so many people who are Asian.