Blogging Through Time

Dominic wrote a great entry today about the concept of blogging over time.

From the entry:

"I have a blog, and I write in it, when I think through memories, should I go into the date settings on my blog and create a post as though I wrote it back then? Or should I write a post today about the memory?"

This is an excellent question and Dominic presents some excellent thoughts on it.

Here's what I think: through time our perceptions, views and memories change. A web log should give you a nice easy tool to capture those changes. But my tool, Reger.com, doesn't. In fact, no web logging tool does.

We tool providers are failing here.

I've been playing around with this idea for a while: give people the ability to "Update" an entry. Instead of appending to the body of an entry, an "Update" would be like another body... a second body with a second date stamp.

For example, you'd be able to write an entry about how much you love Candidate X in the election. A few years later, you can "Update" that entry to show how wrong you were... or how right you were... or how well you foreshadowed the future... etc.

Or when you watch the same movie a second time you can "Update" the movie summary.

Or if you do an entry on your abortion views. When those views change you can "Update" them.

The key here is that you want to be able to see your original viewpoint and the updated one. But you don't want to go searching for them. Dominic says that you could create a new entry: "I'm forced to address issues & conflict that may have sprung up."

So I, the tool monkey, need to show when an update is made and what it updated.

This concept is also like something I've been playing with called "Episodes." Essentially a linking of events. I started thinking about this on our trip to Moab, UT. A trip occurs over time. There are a lot of things that happen... a lot of potential web log entries. You eat out. You ride your bike. You camp out. Lots of web log entries.

And they're all united into a single concept called "Trip to Moab, UT." But again, tool makers (me) don't provide a way to unite them cleanly. So we resort to making one entry... which is what I did.

I want to be able to create an "Episode" and then tie many entries off of it. And I want to be able to "Update" an entry with another one... essentially creating an "Episode."

Hopefully Dominic's entry will spark some schedule reworking so that I can address these things. The main challenge is in the user interface. The underlying data structure to unite entries and update entries is sinfully simple. The complexity is in the user interface.

I need to get off my ass and get on it! Thanks for the thoughts Dom!