I sent this to Eric Meyer, since his post on the subject doesn’t allow for comments:

Your description of a solution to the plague of reverse chronoblogy reads like a description of how to use a good RSS reader. With settings to display the entry tree in chronological order, default “collapsed”– bloglines, feedster, etc. should all provide what you need without a problem…

I guess the question then becomes how much you do on your site proper and how much you leave to tools designed to provide flexible methods for displaying and reading content…

Eric is referring to the issue of seeing what is new, not really discussing content dating per-se, but I have been pondering whether dates really matter at all for most blogs, or if the only real important issue is sequence… which does fit into the discussion.

I chose Movable Type for this weblog a long time ago, and then switched to Textpattern– rejecting Blosxom, the tool that I was most interested in using– because Blosxom relied on the filesystem’s date and time, which is too easily changed when moving files around or posting files from an offline collection, etc.

But do dates really matter at all? I am convinced date-based archives and calendars are of little use for reading a blog. Content which is relevant (or not) remains so regardless of the date it was posted. If most users are like me, they are interested in what Eric is interested in– seeing what is new. Otherwise, they are interested in a specific post, wich means the content, not the date. So what point does the date, without any context to use it as a trail of discovery or interaction, really serve anyway?

Update: Eric pointed me to his earlier entry in which he wrote:

“…saying “yeah, weblogs are backward but you can fix them with an aggregator” is in my mind functionally equivalent to saying “yeah, weblogs are broken but with a completely different method of representing the data and a new piece of standalone software, we can hack around the problem.”

To which I reply [I fixed a few typos here]:

I wonder if the fact that I didn’t get to this quote is due to the fact that the page with the information I was initially responding to (archive page) had your entries in the “wrong” order from what I am used to?

Given your CSS advocacy– a technology with a similar concept in my view– it just makes sense to me that (ideally) the content provider chooses one of a number of different ways to present content while the user would (ideally) be able to get at that content in the way that is best for them.

Your first statement is the case. But weblogs aren’t broken, providers simply have to make an initial, default choice that shouldn’t be the only available avenue. Whether that default choice should be one way or another is open to question, but the answer to that question lies not just in the domain of sequencing, but is directly tied to the frequency of a visitor’s contact with content. Which, in true loopy fashion, ties right back into what RSS and aggregators are best at, which is– in essence– making high frequency contact possible without being forced to a high frequency of (often fruitless) visits…

As a model, embedding this kind of logic in the site itself, as it seems you want to do, doesn’t make as much sense to me as a site providing content in a way that can be manipulated to suit the needs of the user and letting them make those decisions according to what they want. After all, ultimately there will be different preferences and both are right.