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Blogs holding updated documents

Nick Moffit made the wise observation that "blog" is usually just a word for a website that is regularly updated, rather than left to stagnate with an animated GIF of a council worker bludging.

I'd also add that the other feature is that they allow some kind of chronological view of the information, so that people who revisit the site can see what's new since last time. This is a substantial improvement on those corny little new.gif icons we used to use: things are not "new" or "not-new", they occur over a stream of time. What is new to one person might not be new to another. You can approximate "new to you" using cookies, but I just don't think they work as well.

And then you can extend this by exporting it as an RSS or similar feed, so that people can discover what if anything is new without needing to actually visit the site.

So why would any site not want to have all these features? Almost all sites, even if they're not explicitly news or journal sites, are going to be updated over time. People will revisit them and want to know what's new, or they might like to have an RSS overview of changes. Every site ought to have some attributes of what we currently think of as a blog.

At the same time current blogs that I am aware of are a bit unsatisfying in several ways. They seem too tightly coupled to chronology. There's also a limited representation of updates — if I have second thoughts on a topic I want to be able to update it, have people be able to see that it's updated, but not make it pop to the top in the way it does in Blosxom.

Wikis do a little better here: you can view recent changes or history of a page, but you can also navigate without worrying about chronology.

Maybe some other software handles these better than Blosxom does?

posted Thu 27 May 2004 in /meta | link

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