How blogging is broken
Following up on a parenthetical observation from a famous UI engineer, DLB uncovers a design challenge for all blogs with continuous threads.
If you haven't read Jared Spool's superb analysis of how Amazon made $2,700,000,000 in new revenue just by asking, "Was this review helpful to you?" you really should. In fact, if you are in any way part of the business of user interface design, his blog, Brainsparks, is quite regularly an amazing resource.
I myself am in the user interface business from time to time, and regularly enjoy his posts, although I rarely find occasion to blog about them. I tend concern myself in my writing with a slightly different aspect of user experience.
When I read the post in question, I wondered -- as I sometimes do -- whether or not I could add anything to it on BlogLESS. As often enough happens, I decided that my commentary would be superfluous. But then I started thinking about a little throw-away parenthetical in Spool's article, and had a (*erm*) brain spark. Here's what Jared says about the problems of chronologically ordering reviews at Amazon:
For small numbers, chronology works just fine. However, it quickly becomes unmanageable. (For example, anyone who discovers an established blog may feel they've come in at the middle of a conversation, since only the most recent topics are presented first. It seems as if the writer assumed the readers had read everything from the beginning.)
I thought to myself: that's a really good point. I do think that bloggers need to come up with persistent ways to summarize the key arguments or threads made so far on their blogs. I imagine that this would really help anyone potentially interested in reading BlogLESS, and I know it would really help me as a potential reader of other blogs of substantive content.
Any thoughts on a sensible way to do this from any of our UI friends will be appreciated.
