i’ve been converting my blog entries to xml in case i need them in that format to do some dynamic page building in the future (which i prolly won’t as a change in site structure would mess up my legacy links). but on the off chance i do, it’s better to do 300ish now than to do 1000ish later.

as a result of this, i came to realize how although a lot of blogs have an archive, there is really no past in blogging, only the present. I mean yes, an archive is useful because it can get spidered and searched (which is in itself another problem) or you can revisit a bloggers reaction to events (ie 9/11), but more often than not the archive’s information is outdated. in time, links get broken so the blog entry has no context.

another problem is the sheer amount of information. if you keep up with a blog that’s no problem, you just read a paragraph or two every couple of days. but if you just happen on a blog you may have years of entries to read thru. you could always not read past entries, but that just proves my point that archives don’t really serve much purpose.

and like i mentioned before, searching blogs is also a problem because a lot of blogs (mine as well) just put 10-20 entries on one page. now because each set of entries can cover a wide range of topics, if you search for one thing and get pointed to a blog, it may take a long time (depending if you’re adept enough to search for it) to find the entry that contains the information you want. the good news is that search engines may eventually learn to solve this problem because most blogs now have anchors to each particular entry and they can just automatically jump to the closest anchor.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: blogging, orangefever