A fault in blogs - HXA7241 | Hacker News Reader

A fault in blogs - HXA7241

hxa.name

7 pointsswah6 comments

A blog can easily be structured by categories or something and still stay a "blog".

One big question is, what happens with information, when it gets out of date? For example, you write a blog post "Scala is the greatest language ever" and a few years later you decide "Lisp is the greatest language ever". In blog-form you write another entry. In contrast, a wiki-form would mean to change a page, such the the old Scala entry is only reachable some revision system, if at all.

I very much agree. Blog platforms are being used for things that are not blog-ish. But the problem is not overuse of blogs; the problem is a lack of appropriate, high-quality platforms for non-time-dependent info.

There are the various flavors of wiki, obviously. Using Wikipedia as an example is not the best choice, since such software is available.

I'm thinking about something like PG's essay page. With that as a starting point, what could one do? What kinds of features would be interesting to add? We want it to be usable by non-techies; what kind of interface/functionality does this suggest? Could/should it be integrated with a blog platform (or with a wiki, or with something else)? And if so, how?

There's a startup opportunity here, obviously. Probably several.

The thing is, the blog format is a pretty lightweight format. It works for a large variety of purposes. More to the point, it works well as a searchable archive of essays. I agree that a ordering that de-emphasized time would be preferable, but it would either be replaced with wiki-walking or cumbersome index pages (and how would those be sorted? Recency is still a good ordering there.)

I was thinking of a peer-reviewed twitter, anonymous of course.

Text engages the brain, and the brain likes reading it. What's wrong with that? People write their thoughts, erratic and pointless, and other people read them. Obviously the signal to noise ratio will be very low, but so what? By the same reasoning, we should cut down 98% of our verbal communication too.

Your comment supports the argument of the post.

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