Gimlé

Dorothea Salo has been plonked recently for daring to criticise her betters.

The idea that weblogs are periodicals and that periodicals are referenced in most people’s minds by date first, keywords and such second, is obviously a delusion on par with thinking that the moon is made of cheese.

The idea that somebody might be only be mildly interested in these websites and want browse them casually (y’know, the way most people browse the web) by flipping through date based archives (either monthly or weekly, with well designed ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links), is about as likely as farm animals flying out of bodily orofices.

That the majority of readers belong to the general group who read weblogs as periodicals, are not doing research, don’t read it often enough to warrant a feed subscription, and refer to things posted within the last six months old by date rather than subject, is as real as the martians in Uncle Bjossi’s head.

That quite a few people would say: “That sounds like an article I read last week on Salon.com”

Rather than: “That sounds like the article on [insert keywords here] I read on Salon.com once.”

Sheer lunacy of course.

Casual readers, browsers, those who are not looking for anything specific, those who are not hardcore webloggers and are not focussed researchers, seem to consistently get forgotten in discussions on archives, data-mining and the so-called semantic web (the semantic web being something that talks to machines and eschews humans).

A weblog that you can’t browse casually via large chunk archives is like a library where you’re barred from entering and forces you to do everything via the librarian behind the desk.

Not being able to wander around, glance over things semi-randomly, taking in the smell and feel of the library…

Well, it simply takes the fun out of the thing.

Doesn’t make a difference if you are just looking for something specific. Doesn’t really make it less functional in any sort of meaningful way.

If anything, it might force people to be more professional in the way they reference and look for references.

It’s just less fun.

And we can’t have that, can we?

Baldur.