Seth Godin – Are blogs backwards? He makes the following statements:
a. a lot more blogs should be posted in chronological order, like books. If you’re trying to chronicle something, it makes a lot of sense to start at the beginning, as long as you provide regular readers an easy way to just read the current stuff (That’s what RSS is for, right?). No, this isn’t right for gizmodo. But it makes a lot of sense for someone, say, chronicling her experience in a 12 step program.
b. we need Movable Type or someone to create a simple way to create “greatest hits” pages. Not an archive, but a simple way for a new reader to read the ten posts we want them to start with, in the order we want them read, before they dive in.
“Greatest Hits” is easily doable by creating a new category for it. Thanks to Ben for the reminder.
He makes a good point as I had this problem with my Bionic Ear Blog when I was reporting on my progress. To work around it, I posted a link to the first entry. But it’s a lot of work to read the blog backwards.
Most blogging tools do offer the user the option to go from old to new or new to old. It’s really dependent on the reader. Could this be a future feature? I don’t think reverse chronology should go away, but rather new readers have the ability to click a link to reverse the entries from old to new. Let the reader choose the option he wants.
When I regularly read a blog, I don’t want to dig through it to find the more recent entries. As for RSS, when you’re a reader checking out a four-year-old blog for the first time… RSS isn’t going to download all thousands of entries (thank goodness). So how about it?
Now I feel all smug for having said much the same thing back in March. (Although I was, granted, making a much more sweeping generalization and being more dogmatic about it.)