ALL HAIL GOOGLE

OK, I submit.

I surrender.

I apologize (well, no, I don't apologize).

Google is an amazing company...I think there's little disputing that.

When Google took over Blogger and made a mess of trying to force us all to make the transition to its new way of doing things, I was among the frustrated whiners, and there was good reason to complain.

And, like some others, I considered giving up blogging altogether or going somewhere else.

When I finally relented to the pressure to switch over to the new Gloogler (Google Blogger), almost nothing worked, you had to sign on to do every little thing, and those who didn't switch over became alienated from those who did.

Blogging became a bore. It became a chore.

But eventually, it started getting better.

And the company that made every other Web search engine obsolete finally made the necessary changes to actually improve blogging rather than make it more difficult.

So after slagging Google in some earlier posts, I now feel it's only fair to salute Google for making blogging quicker, more user-friendly and, potentially, more entertaining and open to the imagination.

You might see I've added some of these new features to my blog on a trial basis.

They're called widgets and if you haven't made the switchover yet to the newer layout system from the old template system, I urge you to try it. You can always go back to your original blog because they save it.

It makes adding new elements to your sidebar or to the bottom of your blog possible more than ever before, at least for a computer imbecile like me, and it also makes it super easy to do, once you get the hang of it.

Follow the directions on your dashboard to change from template to layout. I'm convinced you'll be glad you did, even if you don't use the YouTube bar or the newsreel bar.

Adding pictures is a snap and so is adding other elements.

On a bit of a different track, however, as a journalist and as a consumer of information, I have to say that this line in little type at the bottom of my Google News homepage is a little disconcerting:

"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program."

Eek. When a computer starts choosing which news stories I should and shouldn't see, I start to become a little redundant...