writing

Michael Miszczak writes about the effects of Google search over the years on smaller bloggers and publishers. First through snippets of information directly on the search page and now through AI summaries and down ranking smaller sites.

Google is often called a tech company, but that’s a misnomer. It might have been true a decade ago, but that label no longer applies to the Alphabet of today. What Google has actually become is the largest advertising company in the world. They feed you ads and make money that none of us can dream of making.

Discovered via Ana Rodrigues.

Earlier this month I linked to a post on Kottke where they talked about using hypertexts in blogs. Arun extends this in his blog with tasteful visuals that would not otherwise be possible in traditional media.

Blogs are native to the web, which affords a very different form of consumption than traditional print media. I love weaving in video, illustration, and animation into my otherwise static posts. For example, my post on the Apple Card extensively uses video clips that illustrate ideas much better than static images could.

This is a post on Kottke, discovered through People & Blogs, about writing on the web and the ability to load a paragraph with links enabling information density. The example given quotes a paragraph from NY Times which contains only 110 words but has 27 links to other NY Times opinion pieces adding "receipts" to their point of view. This is a style of writing that is only possible on the web, something I hadn't fully realised before.