Some weeks ago, Jill mentioned the lack of permalinks in this blog. (Actually they're there, but you have to scan the HTML to find them.) Permalinks lead me to an aspect of blogs that I have a hard time adapting to.
Where is a post really? I tend to understand hypertexts spatially. When the same post is found on the front page, in an archive, in a permalink page, and in several themed archives, I get a little confused.
Also, having to resort to a special page for linking or bookmarking is against the normal behaviour of the Web. I want to bookmark any page, without learning specific rules.
Jill and Torill (in their paper) take it as a characteristic trait of the blog genre that blogs are a list of postings, the last one at the top (didn't Mark write that as well?). Is this really a useful way of organising it? I am probably overlooking something obvious, but to me, it seems that blogs are the way it is because 1) it is convenient for tools like Blogger (just one file to write to) and 2) it looks like Web newspapers. But Web papers have lots of stories each day, and only leads, not the full story on the front page. The full story is a proper bookmarkable, linkable page.
My suggestion is a blog with only one post visible, the last one. And links to the previous, and the next (if one exists). Links to other related posts would make it even better. As I use Tinderbox, it would be easy to redesign this blog to show what I mean. If I find two hours spare time one time soon, I will do it.
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Politics of Search Engines
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The Structure of Conclusions