[This post was written on Friday but some glitch stopped it from actually posting when I thought it was posted, so here it is, only slightly yellowed with age:}
It’s taken me a little while to figure out what Dave Winer has been up to this past week with his redesign of Scripting News, the site that taught so many of us how versatile the blog form could be. I think I get it now.
A lot of the comments he’s elicited have focused on the outre Amsterdam red-light-district photo that has replaced his time-honored cactus. But that’s just, as it were, the window-dressing. (As of now, Monday, that picture is already gone — I guess that image will change periodically, which is a nice touch.)
At first it seemed like Winer was just adding a bunch of categories to his blog. And hey, that didn’t seem so revolutionary — Radio Userland, Movable Type and lots of blogging tools already allow that.
But the changes now feel more ambitious than that. Dave is placing each of his blog posts into a hierarchical outline or directory. (This shouldn’t be a big surprise — Winer’s signature software product was an outliner.)
So, basically, with this new approach, each new post to his blog is now being fed into two alternative navigation systems: the chronological mode blogs all share (“Find post by date”) and a new outline/directory mode that seems new to the blog world (though obviously it’s omnipresent on the Web). In other words, every blog post is now contributing not only to a diary-like timeline but also to a Yahoo-like knowledge base.
I imagine there are other things going on here beneath the surface, but this alone seems pretty neat to me.
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