a new blog format avoids the tyranny of chronology

Sebastian Mary and i were talking last week about the need to re-conceive the format of if:book so that interesting posts which initiate lively discussions don’t get pushed to the bottom. a few days later i met with Rene Daalder who showed me his new site, Space Collective which is a gorgeous and brilliant re-thinking of the blog. click on “new posts” and notice how you can view them by “Recently Active, Most Popular, Newest First, and Most Active.” Also notice the elegant way individual posts emerge from the pack when you click on one of them. Please, if you know of other sites which are exploring new directions for the blog, please put the URL into a comment on this post.

9 thoughts on “a new blog format avoids the tyranny of chronology”

  1. G Campbell

    The Space Collective site may avoid the tyranny of
    chronology, but it buys into the tyranny of Flash.
    My machine is not set up to display Flash; all I
    see when I go to that site is a black screen.

  2. Gary Frost

    We don’t need another blog…however attractive. What we need is a daily blog compiler that picks up the commentary on the future of the book news. Everything from a surge in Kindle reviews to Potter in court to new findings on gelatin size in 16th c. book paper. Then the playing card equity format would also make some visual sense. The live, editorialized relation of the relevant blogs, not a thread commentary, is what will compile the needed narration. The issues of diversity alone will prove relevant as the boundary is drawn. Future of the book and book of the future? Post digital books need some attention too.

  4. genevieve

    Gary, sounds like you are talking about something like TechMeme for publishing news. That would be rather specialised.
    At ReadWriteWeb there are several reviews of RSS filtering strategies that can be used to pull down tailored results from a range of blogs in a subject area of interest. Might be worth a look if you want to draw your own boundary sometime – quite a few tips in this article
    here.

  6. hyokon

    I agree. I believe there are people (like me) who would rather build, revise and update my writing over time. We need tools for slow reading and writing, not just for the fast, non-stop blogging (and twittering and on and on). Here are two projects of mine for that kind of purpose.
    With Paragraphr, a blogger can write a new piece of writing and insert it as a new chapter or a new paragraph anywhere, not as new post as in a blog.
    Rankrz is for bloggers who often publish a list (like best books, best movies, etc.). Why publish the same list again and again as a new post, when you can simply update? We made rankrz for that purpose.

  7. Kate Pullinger

    This is exactly the problem that Chris Joseph and I faced when when we put the first version of ‘Flight Paths’ in a blog; basically, we were trying to use a blog in a most un-blog-like fashion, and it didn’t work that well – we had to manipulate the hell out of it. Now we’ve now moved away from the blog format into a netvibes Universe, but it, of course, has it’s own problems – I’ve just been writing about that in ‘Flight Paths’ today – http://www.flightpaths.net. Thanks for these leads, I’ll check them out.
    Kate

  9. Danny Snelson

    For a clear interrelated navigational blog-space, I’ve enjoyed the way we make money not art functions. Tho mysterious associational algorithms make some antsy, I kno, I’ve found many interesting related posts thru their mechanism.
    Less clear, but more interesting is the work done by Ralph Lichtensteiger at lichtensteriger.de.
    Other associational blog formats, (most common, it seems, on design websites!) such as the Tokyo Art Beat website — wch provides all the info for art events, venues & exhibits here in Tokyo — has a number of functions wch may be useful for a wide-genred blog like this as well.
    An interesting question tho, I’m enjoying following these responses.
    xoxox
    danny

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