Improving Blogging Software

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Yegge wrote one of his rants about the shortcomings of blogs. He focuses on the lack of features to support essay publishing, such as the inability to display the entries ranked by popularity, rather than chronologically.

This reminded me that, about a year and a half ago, I thought a lot about how blogs could be improved too. It was one of those ideas that came into my head while I was trying to fall asleep, and was so pervasive that I had to get up and jot it down. Like most (all) of those types of ideas, I never found time to actually implement it, but it was fun to think about anyway :)

This was around the time leading up to the 2004 elections, when I was reading a lot of political blogs, such as Washington Monthly, where it is often the case that bloggers talk about the same issues over and over again, bringing in recent events to shed new light on them. I started to think, wouldn't it be nice if they could simply post their definitive opinion on a topic and then craft it over time? The opinion would be change tracked, and between each change, there would be a list of things (blog posts, user comments, links) that contributed to the change.

For example, let's say you had written a 1.0 version of how to make the best ribs. Then, you come across this recipe, give it a shot, and change your mind. You write a blog post linking to the site, and describing your experience. Then, you edit your best ribs article to reflect the use of cherry smoking wood, and in the change record, link to your blog post about using the recipe. That creates "Best ribs" 2.0. Anyone who comes to your site can see the article, as well as it's previous version. They will also see in between 1.0 and 2.0, a link to the post about trying out the new recipe.

I mentioned a lot of terms like change event, opinion, change tracking... Here are some definitions:

Blog post

This is your run of the mill, "I saw/experienced this article/link/event today and here's what I think" post. Presenting these chronologically makes sense because they are usually relevant to a recent event.

Article revision

An essay, opinion, article that is relevant for longer than a week. People might want to read this months later. It may change over time, influenced by user comments, recent events etc.

Article

An ordered collection of article revisions, between which there change events

Change Event

A collection of links to things that have influenced a revision change. It can be anything that is linkable, including comments, blog posts, web sites, etc.

Existing software like blogger do blog posts just fine of course, and that is enough for a lot of blogs. However, more and more I am seeing people shoe-horn in essay publishing into their blogs. They could simply post a separate page on their website (if they have one), but then there wouldn't be the built in ability for users to comment on it. Plus, revisions wouldn't be visible. So people use blogs. When users comment on what they have to say, the author might say a few things in the comments, clarifying a thing or two, changing his/her mind etc. Or they might revise their blog post, which unfortunately kills the original revision, making the comments that lead to the change seem out of place.

Some examples. Guy Kawasaki exclusively posts what I would consider essays. John Battelle uses his blog for essays in some cases, and as a normal, "check this out" blog other times.

So what would this post count as? Given that there are only two people who read this blog (when I ask them to), it probably doesn't matter either way, but probably an article. I mean, just reading over it right now, I can already see some new things that could be added (such as the concept of a link blog entry; nothing more than a link), but I don't feel like revising it right now. But I could throw it out there, get some feedback, and then write a revision citing what influenced it. Wouldn't THAT be fun!