Eccentricities

It has always bugged me that websites are now designed for Google first and readers second.

I love this article for so many reasons! The design is impressive from an ID perspective, stopping the reader for important points. And I love the topic.

It's nothing new that folks selling products or services tweak the products based on sales/customer needs. However, this is the first time we update to please an algorithm.

And it's not just Google; YouTubers have rules for how often they upload their overdone and insulting click-batey titles and shocked faces.

If you have self-published on Amazon, you have your "publishing team" (friends willing to plop down a buck 99 to help you out) buy the book in the first few days to hit the best-seller status. These companies are essentially gaming customers.

I plan to find other ways to search out content the old-fashioned way. But,

I gotta be honest; I have not come up with much.

I avoid the aforementioned stupid, shocked look on the face of the YouTuber. I also look for long-form in any media format. Longer writing or videos. I think those are the folks who are putting the time and effort into passing along information rather than just hitting those top 10 lists.

From The Verge article:

"The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.."

I'm open to suggestions if anyone has ideas to turn this tide. I will help by making this the hardest-to-find Blog on the internet. I'm not google analytic-ing, I'm not SEOing, and I'm not putting crap in here unless I want to. This is all Lora :) With spell check and the occasional suggestion from Chat GPT for spiffing up purposes.

So consider yourself welcome, you internet explorer! You've just stumbled upon the digital equivalent of a hidden speakeasy, a blog so elusive it makes the Bermuda Triangle look like a tourist hotspot. Think of it as the 'Where's Waldo?' of blogs, but instead of a guy in a striped sweater, you find a treasure trove of tricky turns of phrase and glossy prose. You've been chosen by your uncanny ability to navigate the obscure corners of the internet, for your impeccable taste, and your knack for discovering the extraordinary in a sea of the mundane.

(Well done.)