All-New Blogger Mesmerizing Time-Waster

It's a good thing I didn't discover this earlier today or else nothing would have gotten done. Today, the good folks at Blogger are launching a gadget called "Blogger Play." What it does is scroll steadily through photos that bloggers are uploading in real time. Worldwide, there's always something being blogged and now there's a photoplay going on all the time, too. You can set it to snail's pace or racing through. If you see something interesting, you can pause and go immediately to the blog. The content is filtered, but, as it is in real time, some PG-or-worse stuff may squeak through. This is how the techie folks explained it:

Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”“Um...,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you: http://play.blogger.com/Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

Set aside a few moments. Now, go Play Blogger. Compelling visual randomness.