Google the Giant

Google is a household name in relation to the Internet.  Everyone is aware of the search engine and nearly all Internet users regularly utilize it.  The company has even become a ‘verb’ in modern day slang.  People will refer to searching on the site “googling” or that they “googled” something.  This just reiterates the fact that the site and company have become universally recognized in modern day society.

Personally, I am a huge fan of Google.  It is my homepage for all of my browsers and I even use the Google Chrome browser when it is available.  I never use Bing or Yahoo to search for anything, but instead use Google.  I wouldn’t say I was addicted to Google, although I use it so often, it is mainly out of convenience. Google is such a quick way to locate something on the web.

It was a genuine shock to me that multiple top ten searches on Google were “Facebook” or related variants of it.  This was a shock because it seems such a roundabout way to log onto Facebook.  It is so much easier to either have a bookmark on the bookmark bar, or even type it into the address bar.  People less familiar with the Internet or computers may not realize the ease of this, resulting in the mass amounts of Google searches.

Google is used for so many different things on the Internet today.  From song lyrics, to movie casts, random pictures, or even as a spell check, the options Google gives its users are nearly endless.  I feel that I feel like many people would be lost without it although I’d like to believe that I could manage without it.  This may mean that we are too dependent on it, and that if something were to happen to it, or change, that there would be millions of people clueless on how to navigate the web. It is such an imposing force, that I believe a lot of users don’t even realize that there are other options available. All in all, Google is a becoming almost a synonymous term with the Internet and the two go hand in hand.

Blog Prompt #1

I decided to read the interview of Scott Rosenberg by Rebecca Blood in her article “Bloggers on Blogging” in 2006. Scott, the Vice President of Salon, first encountered weblogs in 1997 and longed to have his own.

 I found it interesting that the website that he worked at had a “tech log” that he wanted to turn into a blog, but was unable to do so for three whole years.  Even then, it was at a low point in the company’s financial history that allowed him to make the deal where he could begin blogging.

Scott’s blog started off as an example to the audience of what a blog could be, which made me realize that a blog could literally be about anything, even blogging itself! He also mentioned that he would blog in between meetings during a particularly grueling part of his career, as a sort of escape from his job, to send his opinion into the world. 

One point in the article that caught my eye was the fact that Radio Userland, through which he blogged, was a “for-pay” program.  This made it difficult to gain too much fan base, as Scott says in the interview: “there were too many perfectly good free alternatives available.” Regardless, Scott’s page still managed to accumulate over 1.5 million views over the course of four years, which to me is pretty incredible.  Having a thousand people read your thought everyday is astounding to think about.  What is interesting is even at these incredible numbers; Technorati still only ranks Scott’s blog at 7,532.

Overall this interview gave me some insight to different aspects to blogging, such as keeping a backlog of blog ideas for when you don’t have a current topic to discuss.  Scott also mentioned when he would find time to blog and how long it usually took him. Rosenberg talked about how his blogging actually complimented his non-blog writing, as it allowed him to write both long book, with not so long articles, which shows how blogs can benefit a writer.  The thoughts of notable blogger Scott Rosenberg provided great insight to what it means and takes to be a blogger on the web.