I feel like I need a cold shower now...

Ok, this isn't really webcomic related, but has anyone ever actually tried that "Next Blog" button at the top of Blogger?

IT TAKES YOU SCARY PLACES.

Poor me and my old school internet mindset. When I saw the "Next Blog" button I assumed it meant Blogger was pretty much organized the same way that Geocities used to be. Remember old school Geocities? Where all the pages were divided up into "towns", which were divided up into "neighborhoods" which were divided up into "streets"? You could actually navigate through Geocities like you were walking through a city and coming upon little shops and houses. I distinctly remember that when you got to the street level, each person's site was represented by a house, and you could travel from site to site by clicking on houses. Sure, it was a little cheesy, but overall it was kind of fun, in a 1996 sort of way. My friends and I used to have a site on Geocities in high school (oops, I just hinted at my age there!) and I always remember that the site "next door" was the Official Slope of a Line Page, which was a very impressive single page with maybe one image that explained the classic y = mx+b equation.

So, silly me, I thought that maybe Blogger was organized similarily to Geocities and the "Next Blog" button would take me to my neighbor, who is probably the person who next created a blog after me, or the closest to me in the alphabet, or something. I figured, hey, I'll go pop in to my neighbor's blog, maybe say hi or something, you know? But apparently this button takes you to a somewhat random blog every time you click it. Now, based on the few I saw when clicking, it seems to take you to a blog that has recently updated, so maybe it's not entirely random (or maybe the majority of blogger users just update alot), but the point is that it sure as heck doesn't take you to the same blog every time and it DEFINITELY doesn't take you to blogs with similar content to your own.

And, quite frankly, some of those blogs had content in them that I would like to scour from my mind with a wad of steel wool. So, if you're ever thinking about browsing blogs using the "Next Blog" button, consider yourself warned.


On a side note, why the heck couldn't Google make that "Next Blog" button take you to a blog with similar content to your own? They've certainly got the machinery to do it (look at Google Ads, for instance), and it sure would make a whole lot more sense than just sending people to random "steel wool scour inducing" places, don't you think?