There's a lively discussion going on at Suburban Oblivion about the difficult changes that Google has made to their Blogger comment interface. I want to repeat here what I said there in comments because it gets to the heart of the matter:

Speener said: “What galls me about this is the total ignorance of what blogging is about. Sometimes I comment, and then go back to blog about what I just read. The idea is to encourage community, to share with your peers, to circumvent the structure that we’re so often asked to adhere to for no good reason.”

Exactly! I’ve had my blog since June of 2004. I have 112 blogs in my blogroll. I have found myself starting to click on a blog from my blogroll to pay them a visit and stopping upon realizing that the one I was considering is a blogger blog, knowing the difficulty I’ll encounter when attempting to comment. These are the steps as I experience them:

1. Click the link;

2. Read the post (which may or may not include clicking links and reading other things);

3. Click on comments;

4. Click on the “This page displays both secure and nonsecure items…” warning (BTW, “nonsecure” is not a word);

5. Begin writing my comment;

6. Realizing it’s blogger, I open another tab to sign into blogger, something I have to do over and over regardless of the fact that I’m signed into my google toolbar;

7. Go to my blog to pull out the code for the link (I realize I could eliminate this step by learning the code for the link - working on that one);

8. Copy and paste the code into the comment field at the end of my comment;

9. Enter my blogger username and password into the username and password field (this, despite the fact that I’m signed into both my google toolbar and blogger);

10. Sometimes I have to do #9 twice;

11. Post my comment.

Now, I’m thinking that I should put an asterisk by all the blogger blogs in my blogroll just so I can know if I’m going to head over there, what kind of time and effort commitment I’m making. Like Speener said, it shows their “total ignorance of what blogging is about.” *sigh*